Chinese and Buddhist Philosophy in Early Twentieth-Century German Thought 9781350002555, 9781350002586, 9781350002579

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. A Peculiar Journey: Confucian Philosophy in German Thought
2. The Problem of Life in China and Europe: Zhang Junmai, Eucken, and Driesch
3. Resentment and Ressentiment: Nietzsche, Scheler, and Confucian Ethics
4. Technology and the Way: Daoism in Buber and Heidegger
5. Heidegger, Misch, and the “Origins” of Philosophy
6. Phenomenology, Eurocentrism, and Asia: Husserl and Heidegger
7. Encounter, Dialogue, and Learning: Martin Buber and Zen Buddhism
8. Nothingness, Language, Emptiness: Heidegger and Chan Buddhism
Conclusion: Toward an Intercultural Philosophy
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Afterword to the 2019 Edition

Citation preview

Chinese and Buddhist Philosophy in Early Twentieth-Century German Thought

Also available from Bloomsbury: Comparative Philosophy without Borders, edited by Arindam Chakrabarti and Ralph Weber Confucian Ethics in Western Discourse, Wai-ying Wong Doing Philosophy Comparatively, Tim Connolly The I Ching (Book of Changes): A Critical Translation of the Ancient Text, Geoffrey Redmond The Public Sphere from Outside the West, edited by Divya Dwivedi and Sanil V

Chinese and Buddhist Philosophy in Early Twentieth-Century German Thought Eric S. Nelson

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 Paperback edition first published 2019 © Eric S. Nelson, 2017 Eric S. Nelson has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. viii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Catherine Wood Cover image © Wang Dongling 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. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Nelson, Eric Sean, author. Title: Chinese and Buddhist philosophy in early twentieth-century German thought / Eric S. Nelson. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017010074 | ISBN 9781350002555 (hb) | ISBN 9781350002579 (epdf) Subjects: LCSH: Philosophy, German–20th century. | Philosophy, Chinese. | Buddhist philosophy. | Buddhism and philosophy. Classification: LCC B3181 .N45 2017 | DDC 193–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017010074 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-0255-5 PB: 978-1-3501-0104-3 ePDF: 978-1-3500-0257-9 ePub: 978-1-3500-0256-2 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 my parents, Lydia and Richard Nelson

Contents Acknowledgments Introduction 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

A Peculiar Journey: Confucian Philosophy in German Thought The Problem of Life in China and Europe: Zhang Junmai, Eucken, and Driesch Resentment and Ressentiment: Nietzsche, Scheler, and Confucian Ethics Technology and the Way: Daoism in Buber and Heidegger Heidegger, Misch, and the “Origins” of Philosophy Phenomenology, Eurocentrism, and Asia: Husserl and Heidegger Encounter, Dialogue, and Learning: Martin Buber and Zen Buddhism Nothingness, Language, Emptiness: Heidegger and Chan Buddhism

viii 1 13 43 77 109 131 159 201 225

Conclusion: Toward an Intercultural Philosophy

253

Notes Bibliography Index

261 310 336

Acknowledgments A work by a single author is a collective and social effort relying on a relational context of support and encouragement without which it could not arise. The biographical context of a work, too often dismissed by philosophers as irrelevant to theory, binds it to the lives of others without which what is said could never have been nor become again a saying and listening in dialogue with others. An author’s words do not stand in isolation from the world of contact, encounter, and engagement, in which they echo and are adopted, consumed, or lost. I could not have begun and completed this book without the inspiration and assistance of so many teachers, family members, friends, and colleagues, all of whom cannot be named here, and it would not be the same work without the historical denial and continuing resistance to the claim that philosophical—whether understood as conceptual, existential, or critical self-reflective—thinking happens in a variety of unique ways across different epochs and cultures. I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to Roger Ames, Emilia Angelova, Youngsun Back, Charles Bambach, Bettina Bergo, Robert Bernasconi, Jeffrey Bernstein, Andrew Bowie, Javier Cha, David Chai, Lulu Chai, Shirley Chan, Dingdan Chen, Meilin Chinn, Chung-ying Cheng, Christian Coseru, Dan Dahlstrom, Bret Davis, William Edelglass, Owen Flanagan, Martin Gak, Namita Goswami, Saulius Geniusas, Linyu Gu, Jean-Yves Heurtebise, Kuan-Min Huang, Yong Huang, Patricia Huntington, Marzenna Jakubczak, Tao Jiang, Halla Kim, Hyeyoung Kim, Lucas Klein, Livia Kohn, Michel Kowalewicz, Sai Hang Kwok, Karyn Lai, Anita Leirfall, David Michael Levin, Chenyang Li, Xiang Liu, Ronnie Littlejohn, Xiaogan Liu, Christine Lopes, Dan Lusthaus, Rudolf Makkreel, Amnon Marom, Bill Martin, John McCumber, Hans-Georg Moeller, Bent Nielsen, Stephen Palmquist, Yuhan Pan, Ann Pang-White, Jin Y. Park, Graham Parkes, Franklin Perkins, Diane Perpich, Lauren Pfister, François Raffoul, Shaireen Rasheed, Frank Schalow, Martin Schönfeld, Brian Schroeder, Bongrae Seok, Iain Thomson, Kirill Thompson, Ranie Villaver, Mario Wenning, Christian Wenzel, Jason Wirth, Liu Yang, Dongming Zhao, and Krzysztof Ziarek. Almost all of the chapters have a pre-history as lectures in East Asia, Europe, and the United States. Robin Wang was instrumental in the undertaking of this project through her invitation to speak at Peking University, where I first

Acknowledgments

ix

formulated the research project that became this book, and Hongmei Qu, who invited me to Jilin University to give five lectures on the German reception of Chinese philosophy that became the initial draft of this book. I appreciate the comments and questions from the audiences at these and other occasions where the chapters of this work were presented and developed. These exchanges helped me reconsider and rephrase a number of points. I want to express my gratitude toward the support and encouragement of my colleagues at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology for their kindness, openness, and professionalism. Particular thanks are owed to Charles Chan, Kim-chong Chong, Ilari Kaila, James Lee, Jianmei Liu, Billy So, Simon Wong, Shengqing Wu, and Kamming Yip. I have more gratitude than can be expressed toward those colleagues at the University of Massachusetts Lowell who sustained my spirits during a challenging period and encouraged my research in the intersections of Asian, Continental European, and intercultural philosophy: Christa Hodapp, R. Eugene Mellican, Bassam Romaya, and P. Christopher Smith. I have great appreciation for the students in my postgraduate courses at HKUST on Phenomenology (fall 2014), Philosophy of Religion: East and West (spring 2016), and Fundamentals of Comparative Philosophy (spring 2017). Some of the ideas presented in this work were further developed in dialogue and conversation with them. I also thank Xiaoran Chen in helping to create the bibliography, and David, Yuxue Fang, and Mengying Zhang for helping with the manuscript. I am also grateful to my family for their being there and their toleration of my philosophical and other eccentric inclinations, in particular Rick, Jenny, and Dean Nelson. This book could not have become what it is without Bloomsbury Press and its editors. I am grateful to Colleen Coalter, Jason Ceo, Andrew Wardell, and many others for assisting to bring this work into print. The missteps and mistakes occurring in this work are my own responsibility. Earlier versions of the following chapters and chapter sections appeared in print in the following publications: The first half of Chapter 3 draws on: “The Question of Resentment in Western and Confucian Philosophy,” in Jeanne Riou and Mary Gallagher (eds.), Re-thinking Ressentiment: On the Limits of Criticism and the Limits of its Critics (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2016), 33–52; the second half of the chapter draws on “Recognition and Resentment in the Confucian Analects.” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 41.2 (2013): 287–306.

x

Acknowledgments

Chapter 4: “Technology and the Way: Buber, Heidegger, and ‘Daoism.’” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 41.3–4 (2014): 307–327. Chinese Version: “Keji he Dao: Bubo, Hadege’er he Daojia” ⾥ᡔ㟛䘧˖Ꮧԃǃ⍋ᖋḐ⠒੠ 䘧ᆊ, Changbai xuekan 䭋ⱑᅌߞ(Changbai Journal), no. 1 (2014): 5–12. Chapter 5: “Heidegger, Misch, and the Origins of Philosophy.” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 39.Supplemental Issue (2012): 10–30. The section “Phenomenology as movement and way” in Chapter 6 was drawn on for: “Retrieving Phenomenology: Introduction to the Special Theme Issue.” Frontiers of Philosophy in China 11.3 (2016): 329–337. Chapter 8: “Demystifying Experience: Nothingness and Sacredness in Heidegger and Chan Buddhism.” Angelaki 17.3 (September 2012): 65–77 and “Language and Emptiness in Chan Buddhism and the Early Heidegger.” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 37.3 (2010): 472–492.

Introduction

We should not be ashamed to acknowledge truth from whatever source it comes to us, even if it is brought to us by former generations and foreign peoples. For him who seeks the truth there is nothing of higher value than truth itself. —Abu Yūsuf Ya qūb ibn Isḥāq aṣ-Ṣabbāḥ al-Kindī1 “East” and “West” are nothing more than names applied to this or that place according to the situation. There is no such thing as occupying the center and determining East and West. If we do not respect the Way of the Buddha because he is a barbarian, then shall we also not respect the ways of Shun, who was born among the Eastern tribes, and King Wen, who was born among the Western tribes? Can we disparage a person’s Way just on the basis of his being foreign? —Gihwa2 ᠔䃖ᵅ㽓㗙ǃ㪟ᕐℸᰖ֫ПⳌ々⠒DŽ䴲ऴ݊Ё㗠ᅮ݊ᵅ㽓гDŽ 㢳ҹԯ⠆་ǃ㗠ϡ䙉݊䘧ǃࠛ㟰⫳ᮐᵅ་ǃ᭛⥟⫳ᮐ㽓་DŽ ৃ་݊Ҏ㗠ϡ䙉݊䘧ТDŽ᠔ߎ䗍гǃ᠔㸠䘧гDŽ —Ꮕ੠

Introduction The work before you is an interpretive journey through the historical reception of Chinese and Buddhist philosophy in modern German thought, focusing in particular—albeit not exclusively—on the early twentieth century. Its intent is to describe and analyze the intertextual nexus of intersecting sources for the sake of elucidating implications and critical models for intercultural hermeneutics and intercultural philosophy. The possibility of such a philosophy is confronted by the persistent myth and prejudice that philosophy is and can only be a unique and exclusive Western spiritual achievement.

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The chapters of this book consist of a series of philosophically oriented historical case studies, focusing primarily on the intersection between Chinese and German philosophy. They explore instances of the encounter, dialogue, and exchange—and lack and failure thereof—between “Eastern” Chinese and “Western” German thinkers and discourses. “Eastern” and “Western,” as Gihwa noted, are only relative situational concepts. The history of this already existing and ongoing communicative interaction and cultural exchange compels us to consider, more seriously than hitherto, whether a more nuanced and historically appropriate conception of philosophy can emerge through critically engaging and reflecting on the modern encounter between Western and non-Western philosophy, and articulating its intercultural and intertextual dynamics; if it proves impossible to transgress these borders, the old reductive myths of the exclusivity, exceptionality, and isolation of Western philosophy and civilization will continue to hold sway. The question of who can philosophize, and who counts as a philosopher, is a quintessential philosophical question. It was posed by Socrates himself in the formulation of the idea of philosophy: the philosopher is the one who loves (philo) wisdom (sophia). This question has been repeatedly reposed throughout the history of philosophy. This work is an endeavor to repose it once again anew, arguing—in response to the modern Western idea of philosophy—for a more encompassing and historically adequate conception of philosophy than provincializing identifications of philosophy with the history of Western metaphysics or modern Western rationality. Such limiting ethnocentric identifications, and the ideological spell of a continuous Western identity from the Greeks to the moderns, undermine the ostensive infinity and universality—to adopt the language of Hegel and Husserl that continues to be deployed today—of its aspirations.3 The question of what does and does not count as philosophy is itself more than a purely philosophical question. Philosophy has long been identified with the idea and potential of humanity itself, in classical Greek, Roman, and Renaissance traditions, and with conceptual, critical, reflective thinking in Western modernity. There is a close affiliation between the Western denial of non-Western thinking and the perception of non-Western peoples as mere strategic objects of “just” wars and drone strikes, of pragmatic use, neglect, and termination. The denial of the humanity and destruction of the other are constitutively part of the ideological claim that the West is the sole universal, infinite, and cosmopolitan civilization. The denial of the possibility of philosophy to non-Western others is interconnected with the renunciation of their humanity and rationality, as human beings are reduced to mere objects of technical and

Introduction

3

strategic manipulation by denying them recognition as independent persons who are capable and worthy of genuine encounter and dialogical interaction. The much needed emancipation of philosophy from ethnocentrism, often cloaked in the language of a false universality, requires what could be called “a critique of European reason,” or a deconstruction of the Eurocentric conception of rationality, which is simultaneously an internal immanent critique of the dialectic of Western philosophy and an exposure to the exteriority of its—in this case East Asian—others. The history of Western philosophy is historically already interculturally and intertextually bound up with non-Western philosophy. The word “intercultural” in this context should be distinguished from “multicultural” and “comparative.” It is not a juxtaposition of differences or a search for an underlying identity. Intercultural signifies the multidimensional space of encounter between philosophies of different social-historical provenience, each of which is a complex dynamic formation that cannot be fixated and reduced to the identity of a cultural or linguistic essence, or racial type, underlying a supposedly unitary community or tradition. “Intertextual” is a concept developed by Julia Kristeva in her essay, “Word, Dialogue, and Novel” (1966).4 It refers to how texts consist of allusions, citations, reappropriations, rifts on, and misinterpretations of other texts. As Kristeva clarifies, it signifies that “any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another.”5 Intertextuality also refers, as it does in this work, to the intersection of argumentative and interpretative strategies, images, metaphors, and ideas occurring between different discourses. Illustrations of the intercultural and intertextual character of philosophy include: the traces of the materialist argumentation of Ibn Rushd (Latinized as Averroes) in medieval and modern Western philosophy; Heidegger’s discussions of emptiness and the empty vessel and Buber’s descriptions of encounters with living organisms that refer to Daoist ideas and images; or, negatively, the deployment of the idea of “Oriental despotism” from Montesquieu to Hegel to articulate “Occidental freedom”; or the apparently trivial use of the word “mandarins” in the writings of Simone de Beauvoir or Jürgen Habermas, a use that presupposes a previous exposure to and reception of Chinese social-political culture. Intercultural, in contrast to a merely comparative, philosophy is (1) already a historical reality, albeit underappreciated and underdeveloped, and (2) remains a necessary task for contemporary philosophizing. This task is typically interpreted as broadening and opening up the discourses of philosophy in ways that continue to presuppose the primacy of Western philosophy that sets the

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Chinese and Buddhist Philosophy in Early Twentieth-Century German Thought

standard and measure of what should and should not count as philosophy. It is the primary normative paradigm to which other philosophies are assessed and must conform to be included and taken seriously in the discipline. There is to this extent Islamic, Indian, or Chinese philosophy insofar as they fit into this predetermined framework, without any thought or inquiry into whether the opposite could be the case. One significant task of intercultural philosophy is to reveal the multi-perspectivality and multi-directionality of thinking, a prospect that may well be more appropriately disclosed in the works identified with Nāgārjuna and Zhuangzi 㥞ᄤ than in the reduction of the complex textures of these discourses to Western philosophical categories. The word and concept “philosophy” has a Greek origin and a “Western”—and often underemphasized Middle Eastern—history. “Philosophy” was introduced to Japan and subsequently East Asia through the modern encounter with Western learning, which the Japanese initially called “Dutch learning” (Japanese: rangaku 㰁ᅌ). The Japanese scholar Nishi Amane 㽓਼ (1829–1897) is credited with coining the expression ૆ᅌ (Japanese: tetsugaku; Chinese: zhexue ૆ᅌ) that combines the kanji characters for “wisdom” (૆) and “learning” (ᅌ).6 Modern philosophy, since the modern construction of the idea of the West, has depicted philosophy as a unique history from the ancient Greeks to modern Europeans. This, however, is not the Greek or the premodern understanding of philosophy, which intercultural philosophy must renew in order to resist its modern limited conception and for it to be—in fact what it claims to be in theory—an unhindered love and pursuit of wisdom even if, as al-Kindī contended, it originates in ancient and foreign lands. It is not accidental that Merleau-Ponty’s anti-ethnocentric declaration that philosophy’s “center is everywhere and its circumference nowhere,” which occurs in a still all too Hegelian framework, renews an insight from medieval philosophy.7 Philosophy is not merely a cultural or political program; it is thinking about the matter to be thought. The matter to be encountered and thought that philosophy would name is broader in scope than Western intellectual history or the history of Western metaphysics and ontotheology from ancient Greece to modernity. Philosophy was recognized as a human possibility that occurred across nations and beyond them in the cosmopolitan ideal of the Greek and Roman Cynics and Stoics. Classical Greek and Roman philosophy, in which philosophy is selfinquiry about how to live and achieve the true and the good, is in many ways closer to classical Arabic, Indian, and Chinese practices of philosophizing than to its modern reified Western conception as theory without life and analytic technique without wisdom. The histories of Buddhist, Confucian, and Daoist

Introduction

5

thinking in East Asia, for instance, indicate multiple examples of self-inquiry, reflection, and criticism. These complex discourses encompass philosophical argumentation, conceptualization, and interpretation within and across cultural, regional, and historical differences in ways that are not merely customary, finite, local, and particular. They too suggest the prospects and risks of intercultural philosophy in, for example, the long series of arguments, criticism, and countercriticism occurring between East Asian Buddhisms and Neo-Confucianisms.8 A tenacious prejudice of modern Western philosophy that echoes in its contemporary incarnations is the preconception that argumentation and conceptualization do not occur in non-Western intellectual traditions. Asian philosophies have been classified as folk, intuitive, mythical, mystical, and poetic wisdom traditions lacking argument, self-reflection, and universal concepts. Hegel described a defining characteristic of Western thinking as the “labor of the concept” (“Arbeit des Begriffes”) and “labor of the negative”; as a labor that progressively breaks with the previous particular in achieving a new universal.9 Hegel, particularly in his posthumously published lecture-courses on history, philosophy, and religion, and the subsequent tradition employed the distinction between nonconceptual and conceptual cognition to demarcate Western and non-Western thinking. The tribalist prejudices of modern Western philosophy appear to function as a deeply embedded and seemingly unquestionable ‘ethnocentric a priori’ in Western philosophical discourses, operating against the existing intercultural intertextuality of philosophy. These prejudices can begin to be confronted when sources beyond the confines of Western discourses are encountered and counter-examples from a multiplicity of discourses engaged.10 Actual sources— which encompass, to name only a few, al-Kindī and Ibn Rushd, Nāgārjuna and Śaṅkara, Mengzi and Zhuangzi, Gihwa and Dōgen—allow a response to the question: “Who is the Plato of the Pacific? The Kant of Africa?” to paraphrase Saul Bellow’s polemical question: “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I’d be glad to read him.”11 Pointing to non-Western philosophical sources can, of course, only be the beginning of a response to the Eurocentric interpreter who would still be in need of reading, engaging, and comprehending what has already been predetermined in their mind as unworthy of consideration and the labor of conceptualization and interpretation. The possibility of a more genuine encounter and dialogue is constrained and undermined by the colonial and racial history of modern Western philosophy that still shapes its institutions and practices.12 The asymmetrical relationships between Europe and Asia are recurrently interpreted—even among those critics of colonialism who construe non-Western discourses as Western

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constructs—as consisting of a one-way colonial relation transferring and imposing Occidental paradigms onto the “Orient.” Contrary to the narrative of the Western invention of the “East,” and Eastern philosophies, contemporary scholarship is increasingly revealing how Asian writers and philosophers have engaged in the formation of their own discourses and creatively redeployed European sources in relation to their own questions and contexts in their confrontation and interpretation of the multiplicity of Western, Eastern, and hybrid intercultural and intertextual modernities. Concurrently, and often this thesis is met with skepticism by those who interpret the history of Western philosophy as a self-contained internal development of the history of ontology, reason, or spirit. Asian and other non-Western argumentative strategies, metaphors, and conceptions have had a long-term influence on modern Western philosophical and intellectual discourses that are already to an underappreciated extent intercultural and intertextual. In the following chapters, select case studies in the interaction of European and East Asian thought from the late nineteenth-century through the midtwentieth-century in a range of philosophers will be reconsidered. By investigating the reception and uses of Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism in twentieth-century German philosophy, this work tracks the growing intertextual mediations between discursive traditions, which cannot be appropriately interpreted through monocultural hermeneutical strategies that presuppose exclusive identities, closed horizons, or unitary traditions. The intercultural context and historical realities of philosophy is not a contemporary invention of political correctness; it belongs to the very historical movement of reflective and conceptual thinking and philosophy since the origins of philosophy itself in Greece, India, and China, to name a few. Throughout this work, East Asian sources and discourses will be returned to in order to historically contextualize and critically assess the interpretive strategies employed by the European philosophers under discussion. Providing an account of the context, motivations, and hermeneutical strategies of early twentieth-century German interpretations of China and Chinese philosophy in its initial chapters, this work offers a more contextual approach to the question of the relation between Heidegger and Asian philosophy in its later chapters. Reflecting the growing interest in the possibility of intercultural and global philosophy, Chinese and Buddhist Philosophy in Early Twentieth-Century German Thought articulates prospects for a more comprehensive and inclusive intercultural conception of philosophy that is unafraid of its own amalgamation.

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Description of the chapters Chapter 1 offers an elucidation of the reception of Confucius (Kongzi ᄨᄤ) and Confucianism in modern German philosophy. Earlier German thinkers such as Leibniz argued that Confucian thought indicated a suggestive model for Western ethical-political reflection and the reform of Western practices and institutions. This chapter examines the role and interpretation of Confucianism in early twentieth-century German philosophy, in the broader historical context of this reception, describing how diverse thinkers (such as Buber, Misch, Plessner, Popper-Lynkeus, Rosenzweig, and—later—Jaspers) engaged Chinese culture and thought and debated the merits of Confucianism in a modern European situation. Rosenzweig declared Confucius a boring and mediocre exemplar and representation of the ethical, lacking religious sublimity and height. Misch interpreted Confucius as initiating a Socratic style ethically oriented revolution that, through its incorporation of the interpretive engagement with and reflection on historical life, provided a significant model for a contemporary age dominated by the urge to form a new philosophy of life (Lebensphilosophie). Buber emphasized the ethical and spiritual core of Confucian philosophy, concluding in the context of the last years of the Weimar Republic that it was ethically too noble and demanding, as well as culturally inappropriate, for a Europe dominated by the will to power and struggle for existence. In Chapter 2, the interaction between Zhang Junmai ᔉ৯ࣅ (Carsun Chang) and the life-philosophers Rudolf Eucken and Hans Driesch is examined. Zhang studied classical Chinese, politics and law, and subsequently modern Western philosophy in China, Japan, and Germany. This chapter elucidates the work he co-wrote in German The Problem of Life in China and Europe (Das Lebensproblem in China und Europa, 1922) with the vitalistic life-philosopher Eucken during his stay in Germany. It will trace Zhang’s philosophical exchanges with Eucken and the neo-vitalist philosopher Driesch as well as the interest of Eucken and Driesch in Chinese philosophy that both interpreted as a potential source for renewing a Western form of life deeply in crisis. After Zhang’s return to China, he became an advocate in the 1920s of German Idealism (particularly Kant and Hegel), the neo-vitalism of Eucken, Driesch, and Bergson, constitutionalist and German social-democratic ideas, and a renewed egalitarian vision of NeoConfucianism inspired by Wang Yangming ⥟䱑ᯢ. Adopting Confucian and life-philosophical arguments, Zhang debated the merits of Chinese and Western ways of thinking and living with Chinese advocates of “wholesale” or “complete” Westernization (quanpan xihua ܼⲸ㽓࣪). At issue in these debates were the

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nature and scope of logical and scientific method and a free intuitive form of life and, by implication, complete Westernization or Chinese renewal and the appropriate adaptation of science, technology, and modernity within a broader vision of aesthetic-ethical life. Zhang’s philosophical writings fused NeoConfucianism and German idealism in ways that powerfully shaped Chinese philosophy in the twentieth-century and which informed his active social and political engagement. Chapter 3 examines the issue of “resentment,” its function in the Western interpretation of China, and its roles in moral life in early Confucian philosophy and in Nietzsche and Scheler. In contrast to modern European discourses of recognition and resentment discussed in the initial sections of this chapter, undoing resentment in oneself and in others is a primary element of becoming an ethically exemplary person in early Confucian ethics. Contemporary Western ethical theory routinely relies on the assumption that symmetry and equality are the principal means of undoing the psychological and social fixation involved in resentment; yet the asymmetrical recognition of the priority of the other person is necessary for undoing and letting go of resentment in early Confucian ethics. This analysis leads us back to the Analects (Lunyu 䂪䁲), a text that calls for the recognition of both the pervasiveness of resentment under certain social conditions and the ethical demand to counter it both within oneself and in relation to others through self-cultivation and other-oriented ritual propriety. Confucian ethics consequently encompasses a nuanced and realistic moral psychology of resentment and the ethical self-cultivation necessary for dismantling it in promoting a condition of humane benevolence (ren ҕ). Benevolence is oriented toward others even as it is achieved in the care of the self and self-cultivation. In Chapter 4, switching the focus from Confucianism to Daoism, we further explore the intertextuality between Chinese and Western thought by exploring how images, metaphors, and ideas from the texts associated with Zhuangzi and Laozi 㗕ᄤ were appropriated in early twentieth-century German philosophy. This German interest in “Lao-Zhuang Daoism” encompasses a diverse range of thinkers, including Buber and Heidegger, in light of which will be considered: (1) how the problematizing of utility, usefulness, and “purposiveness” in Zhuangzi and Laozi becomes a key point for their German philosophical reception; (2) how it is the poetic character of the Zhuangzi that hints at an appropriate response to the crisis and loss of meaning that characterizes technological modernity and its instrumental technological rationality; that is, how the “poetic” and “spiritual” world perceived in Lao-Zhuang thought became part of Buber’s and Heidegger’s critical encounter and confrontation with technological modernity; and (3) how

Introduction

9

their concern with Zhuangzi cannot mean a return to a dogmatic religiosity or otherworldly mysticism; it anticipates a this-worldly spiritual (Buber) or poetic (Heidegger) way of dwelling immanently within the world. The Zhuangzi reveals a dialogical and communicatively mediated spirituality distinguishable from the monistic, elemental, and anti-linguistic incarnation of the teaching. Zhuangzi brings the “teaching of the dao” back to ordinary life by philosophizing through words, similes, and parables in a way that parallels Hasidic storytellers. The poetic affective word has priority over the cognitive proposition in Daoist and Hasidic teachings. Heidegger’s vision of Daoism, informed in part by Buber’s interpretation, turned toward a poetic dwelling that cannot be reduced to instrumental calculative thinking in order to respond to what is needful in human existence. Buber and Heidegger’s contrasting interpretations indicate two overlapping yet divergent possibilities for addressing Daoist “poetic thinking” in response to technological modernity. Chapter 5 addresses the divergent approaches of Heidegger and Misch concerning the question of the origins of philosophy. It explores, on the one hand, how Heidegger and his successors interpret philosophy as an Occidental enterprise based on a particular understanding of its history as the history of the metaphysical and ontotheological concealment and unconcealment of being. In contrast to the prevailing monistic paradigm in Western hermeneutics and philosophy, on the other hand, Dilthey and Misch recognized the plural character of philosophy, unfolded a pluralistic understanding of historical life, and their pluralistic hermeneutics offers elements for a more adequate intercultural hermeneutics. Misch developed Dilthey’s hermeneutics further by demonstrating the multiple origins of philosophy, as critical life-reflection, in the historical matrices of ancient Chinese, Greek, and Indian civilizations. Misch’s approach to Chinese philosophers such as Confucius and Zhuangzi reveals, despite its flaws, a historically informed, interculturally sensitive, and critically oriented life-philosophical hermeneutics that remains suggestive for contemporary intercultural philosophy and interpretation. The twentieth-century philosophical reception of and dialogue with Buddhism is the primary concern of the final three chapters. A number of recent works have argued for the relevance of classical phenomenology for interpreting Asian philosophies such as Buddhism and Daoism and articulating a broader more intercultural conception of philosophy. In Chapter 6, the reflections of Husserl and Heidegger on the EuropeanWestern character of philosophy, their idea of the unique exclusive spiritual identity of Europe, and how these claims shape their interpretations of Asia

10 Chinese and Buddhist Philosophy in Early Twentieth-Century German Thought

and Asian thought are examined. Husserl discussed Buddhism in a sympathetic manner in two small texts from the mid-1920s, discovering in them a source of ethical and cultural renewal and a teaching akin to transcendental philosophy. Heidegger explicitly engaged with Daoist and Japanese themes in postwar writings. Even as Husserl and Heidegger had moments of engagement with and openness toward Asian thought that reveal possibilities for furthering the project of a “hybrid” intercultural and comparative philosophizing today, both thinkers problematically limited the scope of philosophical reflection and dialogue through the identity-thinking that characterized their understanding of the ideas of Asia, Europe, and philosophy itself. Chapter 7 examines Buber’s statement that the West is in need of learning from the East and his interpretation of East Asian Chan/Zen ⽾ Buddhism in the context of the exclusion and marginalization of Zen Buddhism in twentiethcentury Western philosophy. What kind of learning is called for in Buber’s claim that the West should learn from the East? Does it mean that one must adopt a Zen, Daoist, or other Eastern philosophy? Can the sensibility revealed in Zen Buddhist sources help answer the problem of technological modernity posed by Buber and Heidegger? Such questions find further clarification in the references to Zen Buddhism that Buber and Heidegger made in the 1950s and 1960s. Buber called for a dialogue with and learning from Zen Buddhism in the postwar years, which he elucidated in the context of Hasidic Judaism and Daoism.13 In addition to identifying a specific kind of anti-conceptual dialectic at play in both Daoism and Zen, Buber clarified the skeptical understanding of reality as dream in Zen through Zhuangzi’s dream of the butterfly.14 Daoism and Zen are not substantially differentiated in Buber and Heidegger’s remarks. While Heidegger focused on experiences of the way, emptiness, the gathering of heaven and earth, and responsive letting be, Buber emphasized the paradox, the image, and the teaching in narrative language as well as in the dialogical encounter and learning between “I” and “Thou” in Daoist and East Asian Zen Buddhist sources. In Chapter 8, Chinese Chan Buddhist indications and practices of emptiness (kong ぎ) are contrasted with Heidegger’s formal indication of the nothing (Nichts). Issues of whether paradoxical concepts can be meaningful are addressed by articulating their performative manner (how) as well as their philosophical content (what) without appealing to problematic notions of pure intuition or mystical experience of an absolute beyond the event and enactment of communication. Buddhist emptiness is not an obscure absolute entity. It is not a thing in any sense but is the practice of emptying; Heidegger’s nothing is the terror and disclosure of openness. Both involve clearing and enacting a way

Introduction

11

by wayfaring. The discourses of Heidegger and some forms of Chan Buddhism indicate strategies of self-transformation within the worldly immanence of everyday life through employing the perplexing and transformative language of emptiness and nothingness in (1) aporia, paradox, reversal, shock, and questionability; (2) living words and gestures that dereify habitual and conventional structures and practices in order to enact emptying itself and open up responsiveness to things. Finally, in conclusion, the implications of these case studies for an intercultural discourse of philosophical modernity, a critique of the Eurocentric conception of rationality, and the possibility of a conceptually adequate and interculturally appropriate hermeneutics and philosophizing that call for a critical and diagnostic reflective practice are briefly articulated in outline.

1

A Peculiar Journey: Confucian Philosophy in German Thought

The Master said, “I would prefer not speaking.” Zi Gong said, “If you, Master, do not speak, what shall we, your disciples, have to record?” The Master said, “Does Heaven speak? The four seasons pursue their courses, and all things are continually being produced, but does Heaven say anything?” —Confucius, Analects 17:19. ᄤ᳄˖Āќ℆⛵㿔DŽāᄤ䉶᳄˖Āᄤབϡ㿔ˈࠛᇣᄤԩ䗄⛝"āᄤ ᳄˖Ā໽ԩ㿔ઝ"ಯᰖ㸠⛝ˈⱒ⠽⫳⛝ˈ໽ԩ㿔ઝ"ā ᄨᄤlj䂪䁲NJ17:19.

Introduction: Whose Confucius? Which Confucianism? Modern Western philosophy—which is simultaneously universal in its pretensions about its scope and provincial in its actual practices—has been largely indifferent, when not allergically antagonistic, to non-Western forms of thinking. The very notion of the universality of philosophy is belied by the provincial assumption that it is an exclusively and uniquely Western form of thinking and stance toward the world. The Eurocentric conception of philosophy is historically a relatively recent modern invention. It is not rooted in and is opposed to the premodern self-understanding of philosophy, from antiquity to the early modern period, in which all peoples were perceived as having capacities for rational reflection and the formation of life in pursuing wisdom and the good life. The modern exclusion of non-Western philosophy is interconnected with the codification of the history of philosophy in thinkers such as Ast and Hegel. It is decisively shaped by the European encounter and colonial interaction with non-Western forms of life and thought. This is not only a historical matter of concern; the Eurocentric prejudice—which takes itself to be universal but is at most an ethnocentric a

14 Chinese and Buddhist Philosophy in Early Twentieth-Century German Thought

priori—continues to haunt and confine the experiential and critical potential contemporary philosophizing inside and outside of academia. The dismissiveness of Western philosophers toward non-Western thinking and philosophizing applies to East Asian ruist (rujia ‫ۦ‬ᆊ) philosophies despite their rich and varied traditions of reflection and argumentation in premodern and modern China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. Ru ‫ۦ‬signifies “erudite” or “scholar”; jia ᆊrefers to specialized discourse, teaching, or intellectual lineage. “Confucianism” is the English-language designation stemming from the Catholic missionary encounter with late Ming and early Qing dynasty China.1 The designation “Confucianism” is intended to represent the diverse discourses associated with the ru from Chinese antiquity through East Asian Neo-Confucianisms to current endeavors to revive Confucian philosophy in an adequate modern democratic and progressive form. Modern Western philosophy has had its exceptions and insurgents who opposed its reductive tendencies to exclude, ignore, and degrade non-Western forms of thinking as non-thinking or another kind of thinking that does not count as genuine thinking. There have been and continue to be atypical Western thinkers who, interpretively oriented by their own projects and ways of understanding philosophy, endeavored—if often in flawed ways—to encounter, engage, and enter into dialogue with non-Western discourses. A number of these figures, from G. W. Leibniz and Christian Wolff to Georg Misch and Martin Buber, have engaged Eastern discourses as philosophically illuminating and capable of teaching the West in an “exchange of light,” to use Leibniz’s expression, and encounter and dialogue, to adopt Buber’s language.2 In this chapter, and the first three chapters of this work, we—at least those interested in undertaking such a project—will reflect on the history and philosophical import of attempts at encountering, understanding, and entering into dialogue with Confucian philosophy, focusing on—but not limited to—German philosophy in the first half of the twentieth-century. Confucianism, since the Enlightenment, is a significant case study to trace for the emerging discourse of intercultural philosophy. It has been perceived— earlier in Leibniz, Wolff, and Justi, and later in Misch and Buber—as capable of teaching the West by offering thought-worthy ethical-political insights and self-reflective models that could help inform and reform a Western practice and reflection that has failed to adequately achieve its potential and lost its way. The modern European appropriation of Confucius (Kongzi ᄨᄤ), who is admittedly frequently a constructed image formed in European fantasy than a historical reality in these works, has been an ambivalent process

A Peculiar Journey

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consisting of multiple incompatible interpretative strategies and theses. “Confucius” and “Confucian China” have been aggressively condemned by a series of philosophers from Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715) through Hegel and Schelling to Franz Rosenzweig for failing to appreciate the essentially religious character of ethics and the religious depth and height of human existence. Since Pierre Bayle’s and Malebranche’s identification of Confucianism with the pantheism of Spinoza, the exotic figure of Confucius has been entangled in European debates about the intrinsic religiosity of morality and the possibility of a secular and rationalistic ethics that Confucian ethics was alleged to represent.3 Confucianism functioned in this context as a contested site for internal modern European concerns over the threat and promise of a rationalized and secularized this-worldly ethics. Religiously oriented philosophers and Christian theologians, such as the Pietists who condemned Wolff and forced him to flee from Jena for equating Jesus and Confucius in his lecture on the Practical Philosophy of the Chinese (1726), claimed that such an ethics undermined the religious basis of morality.4 If there is no absolute foundation for morality in God, then morals appear to be relativized to variable social customs and arbitrary individual choices. The secular interpretation of Confucianism is not the only one seen in this journey to the West. Confucius has been imagined in his European reception to be either an exemplary religious thinker or a sage of secular nonreligious ethics depending on how the discourse of tian ໽ (typically translated as “heaven”; less frequently translated as “God”) in the Analects (Lunyu 䂪䁲) and other Confucian classics has been interpreted. Due to the appeal to heaven in passages in the Analects, Confucius could be understood as an Enlightening philosopher of natural theology in the writings of Leibniz, or later Wilhelm Dilthey, who both stressed the ethical in interpreting the religious. Variations on the idea of Confucian ethical religiosity are expressed by Friedrich Schleiermacher and Buber. Confucius is in their expositions a philosopher whose teaching transcends a purely rationalistic interpretation of the religious, indicating the height of heaven above finite human existence. Confucius has been, in addition, conceived of as prefiguring and indicating the possibility of a secular, nonreligious, purely immanent ethics from Voltaire and the Enlightenment through Josef Popper-Lynkeus, Otto Neurath, and (moderated through a life-philosophical perspective) Misch to recent interpreters of Confucius. The American philosopher Herbert Fingarette, for instance, interpreted the Analects as a discourse of “the secular as the sacred.”5

16 Chinese and Buddhist Philosophy in Early Twentieth-Century German Thought

This understanding of Confucius is echoed in earlier accounts. The English Deist and freethinker Matthew Tindal (1657–1733) contended that one can employ the clarity of the maxims of Confucius to clarify the obscurity of the maxims of Jesus: “I am so far from thinking the maxims of Confucius and Jesus Christ to differ, that I think the plain and simple maxims of the former, will help to illustrate the more obscure ones of the latter, accommodated to the then way of speaking.”6 Confucianism, whether deistically or atheistically construed according to the imagination of Enlightenment thinking in Christian Wolff (1679–1754), Georg Bernhard Bilfinger (1693–1750), and Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi (1717–1771) in Germany, Tindal in Britain, or François-Marie Arouet (Voltaire, 1694–1778) in France, drew the opposition of his Western religious philosophical critics such as Hegel, Schelling, and later Rosenzweig. Confucianism’s peculiar journey to and within the Occident has led to its interpretation as a deeply flawed practical philosophy by both proponents and critics of conventional Western approaches to ethics. It has been depicted as inadequate to the rational and autonomous character of ethical personhood by Kant and the Western idea of individual freedom by Herder and Hegel. It is another political and bio-spiritual technique of maintaining oppressive slave morality and regimenting the life of the masses in Friedrich Nietzsche’s description addressed in Chapter 3. Rosenzweig perceived in it the ethos of purely practical calculation and characterless mass humanity lacking ethical depth, height, and personality. This chapter traces episodes in the story of European Confucianism by exploring historical examples of the role and interpretation of Confucianism in modern German philosophy in general and in early twentieth-century thought in particular. The strange story of the Confucian journey in the West encompasses a number of turns and twists in the path about issues such as the nature of philosophical thinking and religion, the best form of government, and the sources of ethics. The key question of the current chapter concerns the latter issue: must ethics be religious, rooted in heaven or God, or can there be a legitimate secular ethics focused on ethical life in this world alone? This chapter briefly reviews the historical context from Leibniz to Nietzsche, while focusing on how a diverse range of religious and secular twentieth-century German thinkers (a group that encompasses Buber, Jaspers, Misch, Plessner, PopperLynkeus, Rosenzweig, the sociologist Weber, as well as others such as Driesch and Eucken who are discussed in Chapter 2) intellectually engaged Chinese thought and culture and debated the philosophical, religious, and ethical significance of Confucian philosophy in the modern European context.

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Part One: The Europeanization of Confucius The Chinese and the European Confucius Early ru ‫ ۦ‬or Confucian discourses prioritized rituals (li ⾂), which should be broadly construed as appropriate practices, socially oriented individual selfcultivation, and learning and self-reflection. The Confucian sense of the self is defined through the cultivation of practices, roles, and virtues that would encourage: (1) an underlying comprehensive disposition of benevolence (ren ҕ) directed toward the well-being of others, which calls for (2) interpretively and appropriately recognizing and taking into consideration (i.e., zhi ⶹ, knowing) the specific roles and circumstances of others in relations of asymmetrical reciprocity (shu ᘩ); and (3) self-cultivation oriented through pedagogical exemplars and reflectively enacted models toward becoming an ethically exemplary person (junzi ৯ᄤ) and potentially a sage (shengren 㘪Ҏ). This art of self-formation through internal cultivation and external ritual practices, and the contextualizing situational appropriateness and reflection on practice it requires, is shaped by the deployment of historical exemplars and orienting models as well as by the existing social nexus of ethical life. Due to this basic structure, expressed briefly and schematically here, there is not one unified Confucian theory or praxis (i.e., a dynamically related set of practices) even as a number of ru thinkers articulate a genuine orthopraxy in the rituals and forms of social life and orthodoxy in intellectual doctrine. There is instead, in its complex historical reality, a multiplicity of ru strategies and positions that emphasize in differing degrees of moral authority and ethical transformation: (1) the authority of the existing ethical order for the sake of its self-organizing reproduction and (2) possibilities for a more extensive ethical realization of social relations and individual character through critical reflection on and the ethically oriented reformation of practices and institutions. The tensions between these potentially conflicting tendencies of traditional authority and ethical-political reform, and between individual self-formation on the one hand and the recognition of the worth and welfare of others on the other, are evident within ru sources and their complexly mediated modern Chinese and European reception. Looking at the Western image and imagination of “Confucius,” it becomes clear that Confucius is not only an ancient Chinese thinker, but we can speak of a European Confucius, formed in the European reception and appropriation of “Confucius,” just as we might speak of a Chinese Marx, a Japanese Heidegger, or

18 Chinese and Buddhist Philosophy in Early Twentieth-Century German Thought

a German Heraclitus. These figures, and what their associated discourses say, do not and cannot belong exclusively to one tradition. Thinking mutates, spreads, and transverses multiple divergent discourses in which unique configurations of interpretation and contestation unfold. Confucius and Confucianism are interpretive discursive formations formed through imaginative projections and constructions and through encounters and communicative interactions. The German philosopher and Reformed theologian Schleiermacher astutely noted in a letter from 1803, concerning the politics of interpreting German Romanticism, the political-theological character of the European reception of Confucius. He observed how, on the one hand, deistic and secular philosophers used Confucian morality as a stepping stone for their arguments against Christian orthodoxy and how, in turn, Orthodox Christians responded by denouncing Confucius as a Spinozian pantheist (e.g., the idea of the unity of natural and the divine) or Wolffian deist (e.g., the idea of God as a rational architect).7 Just as the emerging Romantic movement was misconstrued by its proponents and critics alike, the struggle between Enlightenment and faith in the eighteenth-century had little interest in the Chinese context and historical actuality of the figure of Confucius. This type of interpretive problem reappears throughout the European reception of Asian philosophy. It indicates a possible limit to a genuinely intercultural hermeneutics: the interest in non-European thought might in the end be a reflection of internal European concerns and debates such that a genuine encounter and dialogue does not and perhaps in principle cannot take place. The Eurocentric skeptic, who assumes the indifference of the West toward the non-European world, can repeatedly repose these questions: Did an actual encounter happen or is the other only a mirroring of the self and its own desires and concerns? Did dialogue and learning occur or did the European thinker merely project their own presuppositions onto the other and only discover what they already understood? We will be confronted by the Eurocentrist’s questions throughout this chapter and work. What is illuminating in Schleiermacher’s remark is the role that Confucius is given in the European controversy between traditional Christianity and its modernistic critics. How did an ancient Chinese sage become part of the modern European debate over religiosity and secularism and, more specifically, whether ethics must be religious or secular? One of Schleiermacher’s few direct citations of Confucius in a letter from 1797 reveals another side of the early European reception of Confucianism, in which Confucius is a contested figure who either embodies a religious or secular way

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of thinking. Schleiermacher adopted a religious interpretation, while rejecting its negative form that claimed that Confucian religiosity was merely pagan or pantheistic, construing Confucius’s appeal to heaven (tian) in the Analects— which has varying explications in Chinese and Western commentaries—as indicating the finitude and imperfectability of human reason. Confucius is not then an Enlightenment atheist and rationalist; he shows, by addressing heaven in a crucial moment, that the human use of reason is a way of error in need of turning to heaven to correct finite conditional reason.8

Confucian China in German social thinking: Hegel and Weber Early modern thinkers such as Leibniz, Wolff, Justi, Bilfinger, and Voltaire, among others, imagined Confucius to be an exemplar of philosophical and ethical Enlightenment. Confucianism, as they conceived it, advanced the realization of a higher form of ethical and political reflection that could orient and inform European endeavors at achieving Enlightenment. In contrast to this progressive and reflective interpretation of the Confucian paradigm in rationalizing Enlightenment discourses, German philosophy after Wolff and Justi—in Herder, Kant, and Hegel—construed Confucius as a reactionary and moralistic proponent of a fossilized form of customary moral life and Confucianism as a conservative political ideology of “Oriental despotism.”9 There were exceptions to this interpretive tendency: Friedrich Schlegel, bringing to mind Enlightenment arguments about the role of ethics in directing politics in Confucian China, explicitly rejected the Oriental despotism thesis, noting—much as Leibniz did—the power of morals and laws to limit arbitrary and absolute power.10 Nor did Schlegel envision Chinese history as static continuity and uniformity, as Hegel did. Rather than construing China to be without history, Schlegel portrayed it as a chaotic and unstable history of revolutions, natural disasters, and foreign invasions.11 The model of Oriental despotism as it developed from Montesquieu and (more ambiguously in) Quesnay to early twentieth-century Germany was often associated with capriciousness, decadence, and “feminine” weakness in the European imagination about Islamic and other Asian worlds.12 However, this idea was as much a reaction to the authoritarian obedience to absolute power and the abuses of the European ancien régime as to the reality of the “Orient.” It is an idea that had earlier sources in Montesquieu and Pufendorf, and which was explicitly

20 Chinese and Buddhist Philosophy in Early Twentieth-Century German Thought

linked with the project of biologically justifying racism and white superiority in philosophers such as Christoph Meiners (1747–1810) who influenced Kant’s racial anthropology, and that still influences contemporary Western views of the East.13 Confucian China was subsumed under the one-dimensional category of Oriental despotism without recognition of the particularities and structures of Chinese political and ethical life that challenge such a reductive classification. Hegel’s thinking about China in his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History is the highpoint of the political-theological differentiation of the West and the East that continues to structure Western philosophy’s self-understanding. Chinese ethical-political life is in his account dominated by external despotic and bureaucratic powers, and Western social and political organization as the achievement of freedom. Unlike Leibniz or later Driesch, Hegel lacked appreciation of the ethical self-organization of the community and the mediation of powers, promoted by Confucian moral-political reflection and having affinities with aspects of his own ethical-political thought, at work in Chinese society. Hegel stereotypically delineates the “Oriental world” through his claim that in it “only one is free,” namely the ruler who has absolute arbitrary authority, and the many are reduced and leveled to undifferentiated regulated masses: The Orientals do not know that spirit, or the human being as such, is intrinsically free; because they do not know this, they are not themselves free. They only know that one [person] is free, but for this very reason such freedom is merely arbitrariness, savagery, and dull-witted passion, or their mitigation and domestication, which itself is merely a natural happenstance or something capricious. This one is therefore a despot, not a free human being.14

Hegel’s visualization of “Orientals” and the Orient sweepingly encompasses ancient Egypt and Persia, traditional India and China, and Islam. Despite their regional differences and historical transformations, such as the relatively late emergence of Islam, Hegel connects these forms of life with a lack of selfconscious or self-reflective subjectivity (achieved only in the Christian West) and the endless repetition and bad infinity of a stationary and static existence characteristic of an earlier form of life whose time is past. Hegel differentiated Asian forms of life by categorizing them through his dialectical method in addition to making sweeping generalizations about their unity. India and China are in Hegel’s conception the opposite poles of Eastern existence; while the former negates history by overextending the imagination in “fantastic” religion and poetry, the latter is ahistorical in lacking imagination in the merely empirical repetition of the practical history of families and dynasties that follow the same unchanging rhythm. It is relevant to note that the identification

A Peculiar Journey

21

of the Orient with the exotic and fantastic has a long history in European thought. Kant identified Chinese culture and thought with the fantastic and the sublime in the form of the grotesque in his Observations on the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764), as discussed further in the beginning of Chapter 4.15 Georg Anton Friedrich Ast (1778–1841), the philosopher and philologist influenced by Schelling and best known for his work on Classical philology and hermeneutics, articulated one of the first comprehensive developmental histories of philosophy in his Outline of a History of Philosophy (Grundriss einer Geschichte der Philosophie, 1807). Ast distinguished in this work, which follows the pattern of contrasting “real” and “ideal” philosophies across the history of philosophy, the realisms of the Middle East from the idealisms of East Asia, describing Tibetan religion as an idealism of the imagination (Phantasie) and Chinese practical pedagogical thought as forms of an idealism of the understanding (Verstand).16 Asian discourses are still not systematically excluded from philosophy by Ast and function as a precursor to European developments in philosophy from Greece to modernity. Philosophy is in his work not yet fully separated from other forms of thought, whether religious or practical, and it is still not conceived as exclusively Occidental. The same ambiguous portrayal of Asian philosophies as simultaneously non-philosophy and proto-philosophy can be found in Hegel’s assessments, which are not universally negative, in his posthumously published lecture-courses on the history of philosophy, philosophy of history, and the philosophy of religion. The Chinese are not distinguished by idealism (Ast) nor by the fantastic and the imagination (Kant) in Hegel’s account, which unfolds what will become the standard image of the prosaic pragmatic character of the Chinese. Chinese history is, according to Hegel, an “unhistorical” mundane history because it is the repetition of the same content in the endless cycle of family life and paternal government. Each generation is continuous with and the same as the last. The dialectical moment of departure and individuation is missing that is the condition for the establishment and formation of new families and forms of social-political life. Chinese history is ahistorical in a double sense: in its unchanging repetitive historical process and in its historiography and historical reflection. Neither proceeds through form, infinity, ideality, and intellectual reflection to the height of the concrete historical thinking that Hegel perceived, in his philosophy of history, culminating in the modern Germanic world. It is in this world that “the human being as human being is free.” Hegel’s history of spirit is the formation of individual human freedom that is realized in Christianity and Western modernity:

22 Chinese and Buddhist Philosophy in Early Twentieth-Century German Thought The Germanic nations were the first to come to the consciousness, through Christianity, that the human being as human is free, that the freedom of spirit constitutes humanity’s truly inherent nature.17

It was the Greeks who first discovered freedom through reason and realized thinking to be Mnemosyne, the mother of the muses representing productive memory and reflective remembrance. It was Christianity that dialectically realized the freedom of the whole concrete person in Hegel’s narrative. Hegel’s philosophy—through the twists and turns of spirit in Occidental history—is a remembrance and reconstruction of how freedom is perfected. Hegel depicted historical progress through images of circling and spiraling rather than through the image of a linear development. Nevertheless, despite this divergence from the typical understanding of progress, his conception of history presupposes a dialectically emergent hierarchy of forms of life from the primitive to the modern. From this developmental historical perspective, culminating in the Western freedom of the individual in the constitutional monarchy of modern Prussian society, Hegel advocated the pictorial and pre-reflective character of Chinese thought and denied that there can be philosophical and conceptual thinking in traditional China. Hegel’s negative assessment of Chinese thought is notorious. It profoundly structures the Western philosophical dismissal of Chinese and other non-Western forms of thought to this day. To summarize Hegel’s discourse concerning China, Chinese thought and culture are interpreted in Hegel through the lenses of: (1) “Oriental despotism” in which the ruler alone is free in the use of arbitrary paternalistic power, (2) the supposedly pictorial and nonconceptual character of the Chinese language and Chinese ways of thinking as evident in the Yijing ᯧ㍧, and (3) Chinese thought being proto-philosophically bereft of the labor, rigor, and universality of the concept. The practical immanent orientation attributed to Confucianism in Hegel’s account is a familiar refrain in Western philosophy and social theory. Albrecht von Haller, the pioneering Swiss biologist, described the teaching of Confucius as “cold” in the late eighteenth-century for not recognizing the truth of the higher “second life” (that is, the life of spirit), and knowing solely obedience to the Emperor and not obedience toward God.18 The image of Confucianism as an immanent practical teaching is comprehensively articulated by the sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) in Confucianism and Daoism (Konfuzianismus und Taoismus, which appeared in 1915 and was revised in 1920).19 This work is part of Weber’s classic portrayal of the sociology of religion and the economic ethics of the world religions. It has

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exerted an extensive influence in the twentieth-century Western understanding of China and continues to inform, and its merits debated, in contemporary interpretations of capitalism in China and East Asia. Weber interpreted “world-affirming” and “optimistic” Confucianism as a “religious ethic” that evolved into the bureaucratic institutional ethic of imperial China. The Confucian this-worldly ethos, relying on a conception of human nature as essentially good, encouraged a “practical rationalization” of social life limited by its being a practical art of the possible directed at adjustment to the world: that is, pragmatic appropriateness, accommodation, tolerance, and passive harmony that limit prospects for actively transforming and reorganizing the natural and human world.20 Confucian literati aimed primarily at achieving a bureaucratic position and social status to which the pursuit of wealth, the means to live well as a person of status, was subordinated. Confucian techniques of the self therefore represented in Weber’s analysis an incomplete ascetic practice that is insufficiently otherworldly to form the sense of interiority, work, and reward that became the spiritual precondition for the formation of Western capitalism and Western modernity through the ascetic regime of Protestant Christianity. In contrast, in Weber’s accounts of Hinduism and Buddhism, “world-denying” Indian ascetic religiosity was overly ascetic and consequently adverse to such developments.21 Weber conceived of Buddhism as a redemptive religion without God, and Confucianism as a religion lacking transcendence and redemption beyond the immanence of this life.22 Due to this deficiency, and it does indeed function as a deficiency in Weber’s comparative analysis of the formation of modern Western capitalism, Confucianism struggled to rationalize and overcome the redemptive and magical qualities in popular Chinese culture offered by its opponents that it could never subdue: Daoism and Buddhism. Confucian rationality hierarchically distinguished itself from popular Chinese religiosity, while failing to rationalize and restructure it and ordinary life.23 Elements of magical thinking continued within Confucianism itself in its acceptance of the Yijing and divination. Limited by its sense of tradition and appropriateness, i.e., its lack of radicalness and comprehensiveness, Confucianism did not rationalize all cultural and social elements into an integrated systematic totality that informed every aspect of life.24 The Confucian intellectual-organizational system is incomplete from Weber’s developmental historical perspective both as a form of religiosity connecting the natural and supernatural and as a form of disenchantment, rationalization, and secularization that could produce a nontraditional or modern civilization. Weber acknowledges that the medieval Chinese and Islamic worlds were far

24 Chinese and Buddhist Philosophy in Early Twentieth-Century German Thought

more intellectually and technologically advanced than the medieval West. Nonetheless, it would be in the West that a comprehensively rationalized, bureaucratized and instrumentally organized, universalistic civilization formed with all of its associated pathologies.

Franz Rosenzweig and the banality of sagehood The early twentieth-century German-Jewish religious philosopher Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929) was an explicit opponent of Hegel’s philosophy, with which he was deeply familiar having written his dissertation on Hegel and the State (published in 1920), while on the topic of non-Western philosophy fundamentally reproducing it. Rosenzweig would, in the spirit and style of Hegel, dismissively assess Chinese, Indian, and Islamic thought in his prioritization of the role of Judaism in the history of the West and his reversal of German Idealism in his major work The Star of Redemption (1921). Rosenzweig countered the antiSemitism of the German philosophers by bringing attention to the significance of Jewish ethical traditions and prophetic voices. This significant reinterpretation of philosophy did not extend to non-Western discourses. Rosenzweig is particularly dismissive toward the Confucianism he depicted as “characteristic” of the Chinese. He interpreted Confucius in this key work as a teacher of an unphilosophical practically oriented and this-worldly morality deprived of spirit understood as the height of the divine.25 Based on reasons related to those offered in Hegel and Weber, Rosenzweig classifies Asian philosophies below Western philosophy while placing Judaism in a different position to it. Confucianism is essentially incomplete in comparison to Western spiritual history. He described Confucius as a mediocre exemplar and banal representation of the ethical, since—according to his account—Confucius lacked the religious sublimity and height of the monotheistic prophetic tradition. Rosenzweig problematically applies his questionable portrayal of Confucianism in a racially charged way to the Chinese people as a whole: It must be said to the honor of mankind that really nowhere else except in China could such a boring man as was Confucius have become the classical model of the human. Something quite other than character is the mark of the Chinese man.26

Rosenzweig caricaturized the Chinese as devoid of individual life, and lacking ethical and spiritual depth; their qualities of life are deemed to be only those of mass humanity engaged in practical pursuits. The Chinese “idea of the sage,

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whose classical embodiment is once again Confucius, strays from all possible particularity of character; this is really the man without character, that is to say the ordinary man.”27 This portrayal of the Chinese shares features with the antiSemitic interpretation of the Jewish people who were denied in the anti-Semitic imagination the higher pursuits of humanity as a supposedly practical people devoid of noble ethical and religious qualities. Rosenzweig’s caricature is not solely directed against the Chinese as such; it is a critique of the contemporary European situation. As it did for Nietzsche a few decades previously, as examined further in Chapter 3, the caricature of the Chinese served as a warning against the “Sinification” of European life through the development of anti-spiritual, anti-individualist, egalitarian socialist, and social democratic politics.28 Europeans were being conditioned and trained into a “Chinese” like feminine passivity and a superficial pursuit of mere “happiness” under an abject equality of the masses directed by arbitrary despotic powers. The forces of modernity threatened to create a “Chinese” condition of servitude instead of achieving genuine human emancipation.29 The European anxiety about a Chinese mechanization of life and egalitarian “leveling” of social classes and distinctions continued into the twentiethcentury. Max Weber would identify contemporary China and the United States as examples of “levelled” mass societies in which people sought to differentiate and distinguish themselves in various ways such as participating in exclusive associations and clubs.30 Weber’s depiction of Confucian and modern China allows for different paths of character formation and individuation in the Chinese world, which is lacking in other accounts. The dimension of individuality in Chinese life is more carefully and fully articulated in the works of Georg Misch examined later in this chapter and in Chapter 5. It is specifically the altruistic ethos of the Chinese that is to blame for its condition for Nietzsche, which he associated with Confucian and Buddhist ethics.31 Rosenzweig shared similar fears about the fate of spirit in the West, which is symbolically represented by the Chinese condition of life. Rosenzweig diverges, however, from Nietzsche’s assessment of the negative origins and effects of altruism, identifying the ethics of the other with the ethical height of monotheism in contrast with what he considered to be the ethical poverty and selfishness of paganism. It has been maintained that Rosenzweig’s thinking of the dialogue between Christianity and Judaism, and the ongoing dialectic between Athens and Jerusalem that defines the West in his narrative in the Star, could be a significant source for intercultural hermeneutics. This discourse, as well as its later variations

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in Levinas, no doubt has suggestive moments. It is insufficient, particularly in comparison to the opening toward other lives and discourses evident in the writings of Buber and Misch, in limiting intercultural hermeneutics to a dyadic relationship between two moments (e.g., the discourse of Athens and Jerusalem) while neglecting and actively denigrating non-Western forms of life and reflection in the Chinese, Indian, and Islamic worlds. Rosenzweig’s portrayal of Confucius and “Confucian China” in The Star of Redemption shares many of the worst features of the anti-Confucian lineage in European philosophy that proceeds from Montesquieu and Malebranche through German Idealism and Nietzsche to twentieth-century German philosophy. Rosenzweig’s dismissive view of the Chinese had an ironic fate given how aesthetic modernists in the 1920s transformed the supposed vices of the Chinese into virtues. The Orientalist enthusiasm of the literary avant-garde of the early twentieth-century modernists, most notably articulated in the interpretations of Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa, reversed Rosenzweig’s negative essentialist assessment of the characterless lack of personality and individuality of the Chinese. One significant element of the interpretation articulated by Pound and Fenollosa was the construal of ideographic Chinese written characters as expressions of movement and elemental feelings in relation to nature.32 Chinese characterlessness and naturalism would be reinterpreted as aesthetic and ethical virtues, indicating avenues for experimental modernism. The case of Walter Benjamin is noteworthy in this regard. He explicitly quotes Rosenzweig’s statement about characterlessness and reverses its direction by noting how “Chinese characterlessness” is not a deficiency or lack; it indicates instead “a very elemental purity of feeling.”33 Chinese “naturalness” and natural relation to the emotions, in contrast to the alienation and artificiality of modern Western feeling, is revealed for Benjamin through the gestural language characteristic of Chinese theater that his contemporary European writers were rediscovering, in particular Franz Kafka and Bertolt Brecht who had their own fascination with China. The “levelled” and “cold” naturalness and objectivity of the person without character and qualities linked the traditional Chinese aesthetic with the modern Western aesthetic avant-garde.

The anti-Socratic and Socratic Confucius In another interpretive tendency of the idea of Confucius in the West, modern European thinkers juxtaposed the figures of Socrates and Confucius, asking

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whether (1) Confucius inaugurated a revolution in enlightened ethical reflection or whether he was a tradition-bound moralist of the kind whom Socrates would have questioned; (2) Confucius practiced a form of logical or “scientific” argumentation comparable to Socrates; and (3) Confucius had a sense of the transcendent and the religious akin to Socrates or at least Plato’s vision of Socrates ascending toward the form of the good in the Symposium. Enlightenment thinkers, particularly Diderot and Voltaire in France, envisioned Confucius as “the Chinese Socrates”—an expression adopted by Kant despite his generally negative assessment of Chinese thought and culture—who could be enlisted against the repressive otherworldly dogmas of the Christian church.34 The historical linking of Confucius with the European Enlightenment would produce its repudiation in critics of the Enlightenment such as Hegel and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775–1854), who both negatively linked Chinese thought with the Enlightenment.35 Schelling interpreted Confucius in his Philosophy of Mythology as an anti-Socrates of quietist social conformity who lacked the philosophical movement from the everyday order toward the transcendence of the divine recognizable in Socrates.36 We find here yet again the idea of the practical pragmatic character of Chinese thinking and the lack of philosophy as an ascent from the ordinary world of sense perception to the ideal forms. Schelling, like most of the German reception of Chinese thought, takes no notice of the complex and sophisticated Neo-Confucian discourses of the mind (xin ᖗ), patterning principle (li ⧚), and material force (qi ⇷) that are analogous in ways to the Western Platonic and Neoplatonic tradition to which Schelling appeals. Schelling’s Confucius relied on public life and opinion, whereas Socrates challenged it and placed it deeply into question for the sake of a higher truth and way of life. Confucianism consists merely of pragmatic advice about moral and political life such that it cannot compare to authentic Socratic questioning or philosophizing.37 Schelling concluded that despite the appearance of an overcoming of mythology in Confucianism, “Confucius shared nothing in common with Greek philosophy” because of its exclusion of what he described as the higher potentiality of the true living God in knowing consciousness that is revealed in Greek and Christian philosophy.38 The vision of a proto-modernistic secular and enlightening Confucian ethics continued to fascinate Enlightenment-oriented thinkers in later periods. Some imagined Confucius as a progressive or hyper-progressive thinker whose teachings could instruct and help reform the troubled contemporary West.

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Inspired by Voltaire, the Austrian scientist, secular public intellectual, and social reformer Josef Popper-Lynkeus (1838–1921), a friend of Ernst Mach and Albert Einstein and possibly a distant relative of Karl Popper, repeatedly expressed intense enthusiasm about Confucius as a progressive secularizing Enlightenment philosopher; he aligned Confucius—in an 1878 work on the contemporary significance of Voltaire—with Caesar and Voltaire as the three “greatest” persons of world history, asserting that Confucius was the greatest of the three.39 Popper-Lynkeus depicted Confucius as a philosopher who surpasses Socrates and other Western philosophers; he is the “Newton of morality.” Confucius offered a “precise codification” of the fundamental ethical feeling of human piety (which should be freed of superstitious elements associated with the ancestral cult), and—via a quotation—is claimed to be the teacher for whom Europe has long been waiting.40 This genuinely universalistic Enlightenment philosopher from Eastern antiquity stood in opposition to the irrationalist, nationalist, and racist particularism of the modern West. Confucius, like Alexander the Great and Goethe, is conceived of as an advocate of cosmopolitanism in contrast with the narrowness of racial hygienists and ideologists of Aryanism such as Otto Ammon, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and Alfred Ploetz.41 He described in his autobiography (Selbstbiographie, 1917) how he became fascinated with China in 1865 through reading a work of Gustav Friedrich Klemm (1802–1867) on the history of culture that led to his subsequent studies of Confucian ethics and Chinese poetry that led to his deep appreciation for the Chinese way of life. In notable contrast to Rosenzweig’s assessment of Confucius in The Star of Redemption, Popper-Lynkeus remarked that Confucius offered a teaching that could cultivate and elevate the “Aryan” West’s ethical sensibility, although it would be a difficult struggle for “cold” Western thinking and poeticizing to appreciate the sensitivity, nuance, and depth of Chinese feeling and imagination.42 While thinkers from von Haller to Rosenzweig identified the Chinese with impersonal indifference and coldness of feeling, this condition described modern Western humanity more than any other for Popper-Lynkeus. Popper-Lynkeus is an heir to the Enlightenment’s employment of the idea of the secular ethical character of Eastern philosophy to criticize Western belief in faith and revelation. In a posthumously published work on religion, he argued that the ethical significance and exemplarity of Confucius and the Buddha are “far superior” to the contradictory teachings of Jesus.43 The essence of Confucianism could be separated from Chinese myths and superstitions in a way that Christianity— intrinsically interconnected with the magic and myths of the Gospels—cannot

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be. Confucianism promoted the cultivation of the highest level and purest form of ethical life (Sittlichkeit) in China based on natural moral feelings, such as piety and respect for other persons, without appealing to superstition or the supernatural that promote enthusiasm and fanaticism rather than practicing morality.44 The China and Orient constructed by Popper-Lynkeus are more progressive and advanced than the Occident in understanding, teaching, and practicing the ethos of human piety and genuine autonomy. The Confucian cultures of the East teach the value of and respect for the life of each individual person, including those who are lowly and abject, and had a greater tendency toward peace than a Western civilization that was organized for war and exploitation. This idealizing portrait of the Confucian Far East had motivations internal to his own hermeneutical situation. This model of Confucian life was critically deployed to confront the brutality and corruption of Western colonialism in East Asia as well as the ethical and social-political failures of Western societies, in which individuals were used, degraded, and tossed aside under industrial capitalist conditions. The Confucius-image of Popper-Lynkeus is one of a cosmopolitan, humanistic, progressive, Enlightenment-oriented philosopher attuned to the educational formation of elemental moral feelings and care for the welfare of others in ethical and social-political life. Confucian ethics was, for the individualistic half-socialist Popper-Lynkeus, more comprehensive and insightful than Western ethics in comprehending the whole of human life; both its natural sentiments and cultural cultivation, individual self-development and other-oriented responsibility. The Vienna Circle logical positivist philosopher and socialist Otto Neurath (1882–1945) expressed similar views to Popper-Lynkeus. Neurath claimed that “at least in one ancient and traditional society, China,” there was a philosophy that was “on the whole untheological and concerned with the architecture of living together” and consequently is the only philosophy of antiquity that prefigures the modern need for an ethical “socialism of real life.”45 Neurath remarked in another work, taking aim at the Orientalism of Western intellectuals and their faddish appropriation of Chinese philosophy, that it is not a fair exchange between Europe and China that a few educated Europeans delight in the fruits of Chinese civilization and literature while China is looted by the Western powers: “What significance does it have if a few European men of letters tell a small circle of educated people about Chinese philosophy, about Confucius and Lao-tse [Laozi 㗕ᄤ], when set against the fact that the blessings of world traffic first enabled the Chinese properly to get to know Europe as an international organization for robbery…”46 Neurath contended in the context of a critique

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of bourgeois liberal pacifists, and the hypocrisy of their internationalism, how Orientalist enthusiasm was interconnected with the active expropriation of and violence against Eastern peoples. The comparison between Confucius and Socrates was not only a Western concern. It was also pursued in Chinese contexts where it could serve as a device in support of either modernization or advocating for the Confucian tradition under modern conditions in defense of Confucius by associating him with Socrates. There are a range of examples of the problematic of what Shengqing Wu described as “modern archaics” in Republican China: a group of conservative intellectuals, who promoted traditional Chinese culture in response to the New Culture Movement (xin wenhua yundong ᮄ᭛࣪䘟ࢩ) from 1915 to 1923 and the associated May Fourth Movement (wusi yundong Ѩಯ䘟ࢩ) in 1919, published the inaugural issue of their journal Xueheng ᅌ㸵 (Critical Review, published from 1922 to 1933) in January 1922 with juxtaposed pictures of Confucius and Socrates.47 The figure of Socrates was utilized by the Xueheng school, with their belief in the compatibility of traditional Chinese and Western cultures, to strengthen the standing of Confucius who was under attack from iconoclastic intellectuals of the Republican era. The critique of Confucianism would be intensified under communism, as Confucius was denounced as an epitome of the “feudalistic” past and an enemy of modernization during the Maoist period.

Part Two: Retrieving Confucius: Buber, Misch, and Jaspers Georg Misch: The Confucian ethical revolution A distinctive interpretation of Socrates and Confucius is found in a neglected classic of intercultural hermeneutics written by Georg Misch (1878–1965): Der Weg in die Philosophie (literally, “The Way into Philosophy”). This work was first published in German in 1926 and published in English in a substantially revised form as The Dawn of Philosophy: A Philosophical Primer in 1951.48 Misch was the student and son-in-law of the hermeneutical life-philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey, and a professor of philosophy in Göttingen, except during his exile from Nazi Germany from 1935 to 1946 due to his Jewish background. Misch interpreted the life and teaching of Confucius as revealing the loftiness of moral personality in the formation and cultivation of an embodied

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rational individuality in response to the European philosophers’ negative view of Confucius evident in Hegel, Schelling, and Rosenzweig.49 Rosenzweig had denied the Chinese individuality and personality. Misch is one of the few European philosophers to recognize how different forms of subjectivity, selffashioning, and individuation occur in non-Western forms of life. He portrayed the rich Chinese historical and biographical tradition in this problematic context, which included the history of Chinese, Indian, and Islamic lives as well as European ones, in his pioneering and expansive History of Autobiography. Autobiographical and biographical writing, in its philosophical import for what it reveals about individual and social life, is one way in which these—to the Western gaze seemingly invisible—lives become visible. Weber, Misch, and a few decades later Karl Jaspers in his writings on the axial age and the great foundational exemplary thinkers interpreted the figure of Confucius as inaugurating, much like Socrates, an ethical transformation of society.50 They diverged, as previous and later generations of interpreters would, on the issue of whether Confucius initiated a new model of philosophical and ethical self-reflectiveness (Misch, Jaspers) or prioritized the ethical as the center point of the religious (Weber and, earlier, Dilthey). Dilthey had interpreted Confucius in a cursory way as interpreting the religious according to a moral ideal.51 Misch articulated his ethical and philosophical significance, arguing in his important work for intercultural philosophy Der Weg in die Philosophie that Confucius initiated a Socratic style yet distinctive ethically oriented revolution in thinking and practice. Confucian ethics aims at the ethical liberation (freimachen) of existence within the immanence of historical life rather than seeking redemption in transcendence beyond this worldly existence.52 The Socratic and Confucian lesson concerns reflectively awakening to this life rather than rising to a world beyond the world. According to Misch, a this-worldly immanent self-reflection concerning the self and the community is evident in Confucian discourses that are intrinsically philosophical if philosophy is understood as the movement of critical reflection on self and world: The assumption that Greek-born philosophy was the “natural” one, that the European way of philosophizing was the logically necessary way, betrayed that sort of self-confidence which comes from narrowness of vision. The assumption falls to the ground directly [when] you look beyond the confines of Europe. The Chinese beginning of philosophy, connected with the name of Confucius, was primarily concerned with those very matters which according to the traditional European formula were only included in philosophy as a result of the reorientation effected

32 Chinese and Buddhist Philosophy in Early Twentieth-Century German Thought by Socrates, namely, life within the human, social, and historical world. The task of the early Confucians was to achieve a rational foundation for morality which should assure humans their dignity and provide an ethical attitude in politics.53

In contrast to the habitual exclusion of Confucius—not to mention other non-Western philosophical figures—from the Western philosophical canon, Misch argued that Socrates could not be considered a philosopher either if the same criteria were consistently applied; e.g., dialogical and indirect teaching instead of an explicit systematic theoretical discourse, reflecting on ethical life rather than speculation about nature or the supernatural, and the immanent hermeneutical awakening of historical life to itself in conjunction with individual self-cultivation (Bildung) in contrast with the impersonal and neutral external or transcendent point of view favored by modern Western philosophy.54 Misch’s awareness of the autobiographical dimensions of philosophy, and his notion of a situated reflection and rationality, are important elements of his interpretive openness to non-Western philosophy. Misch’s strategy in The Dawn of Philosophy is significant for a contemporary intercultural hermeneutics by widening the conception of philosophy to encompass Confucius and Chinese thought. It does this not by appealing to the problematic idea of a perennial philosophy, or a hidden universal unity in human thought; nor does it overemphasize the role of genius and the “great person,” as in Jaspers’s historical portraits of the norm-setting paradigmatic individual thinkers who offer guiding models for humanity to follow.55 Misch’s intercultural hermeneutics, which begins with his own European hermeneutical situation as his point of departure, is evident when he discusses the affinities and differences between Socrates and Confucius. The difference between Socrates and Confucius is not that one is inside philosophy and the other is thematized as outside it, but it consists in the different styles of dialogue and argumentation used by these two thinkers. In the case of Socrates, there is a particular form of logical and scientific argumentation that is peculiar to the early Western tradition, even as logic and argumentation cannot be taken to be exclusively Western practices.56 Misch’s argumentation in this The Dawn of Philosophy transformed the more limited point of his teacher Dilthey, who—as mentioned above— interpreted Confucius as placing ethics in the middle-point of religion. After the stages of natural and cultural religion arises ethical religion that Dilthey identified with Confucius, the Buddha, Jesus, and Mohamed.57 Misch is closer to the Enlightenment interpretation of Confucius even as he transforms it in a hermeneutical and life-philosophical way.

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An exchange of life: Confucianism as self-reflective life-philosophy Misch unfolded a hermeneutical life-philosophical account of the teaching of Confucius in a way that Dilthey never accomplished. Contrary to Hegel’s account of Confucianism, Misch interpreted Confucianism as a discourse of concrete historical reflection. Confucian ethics provided a powerful model for an age dominated by the urge to form a new philosophy of life (Lebensphilosophie) through the early Confucius’ inclusion of the interpretive engagement with and reflection on the conditions of “historical life.” This new emerging philosophy would either learn from philosophies such as Confucianism that further historical enlightenment and our critical capacities for historical reflection or it would be undone by the crisis of reason that undermines our capacity for reflection and critique in the mere absorption in and celebration of irrational and violent biological and historical life-forces. This sense of crisis shaped the German reception of Confucianism in the 1920s, as will be further examined in the works of Eucken and Driesch in Chapter 3. Misch’s interpretation of Confucianism in this work was, sharing some affinities with Buber’s 1928 lecture discussed below, shaped by the sense of crisis and impending disaster of Weimar Republic Germany. Confucianism is fundamentally philosophical in reflectively engaging our practical life-situation with the aim of elucidating and morally transforming it. It consequently can speak to the modern Western situation limited by the false choice between an abstract rationalism detached from life and a concrete irrationalism unreflectively attached to life’s instincts and urges. Misch’s conception of philosophy has noteworthy implications for considering its intercultural nature, as will be discussed later in detail in Chapter 5 on Misch, Heidegger, and the origins of philosophy. Philosophy occurs where thinking occurs rather than being defined as a property of one historical tradition from ancient Greece to modern Europe. To speak pluralistically of “philosophies,” or to think “philosophy” as intrinsically singularly plural instead of giving into the temptation that there can be one exclusive measure of what is and what is not philosophy, may sound inexplicable to ears habituated and trained to thinking of philosophy as either one universal theoretical truth or as one particular historical and fateful transmission from the Greeks to their self-declared modern Occidental inheritors. Yet if, as the hermeneutical life-philosopher Misch argued in the 1920s, the unity of philosophy does not consist in the identity of

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one theoretical vision or one historical tradition, then its universality need not entail the negation of the particularities through which it actually occurs and is experientially and historically enacted. Philosophy has its living actuality in the concrete moments in which, according to Misch, there is an encounter, crisis, and breakthrough (Durchbruch)—that we will return to in Chapter 5 in a discussion of Misch and Heidegger—which leads to critical reflection on life and its conditions and to personal and social transformation. These concrete moments of disorientation and reorientation— of breakthrough, reflection, and transformation—occurred in diverse forms in China, India, Israel, Persia, and ancient Greece, as well as in the modern Enlightenment that has a unique historical significance for Western civilization. The “breakthrough” of the world into the limited and self-limiting self does not occur through any particular content; it is manifest in the Buddha’s reorienting exposure to the suffering of others or in the endeavors of Mencius (Mengzi ᄳᄤ) to dialogically awaken King Hui of Liang (Liang Hui Wang ṕᚴ ⥟) to his responsibility for others. The occurrence of breakthrough, reflection, and potential transformation occurs in the midst of the nexus of concrete historical life. Misch’s pluralistic conception of philosophy as taking place through breakthrough and self-reflection remains suggestive. It does not presuppose one universal philosophical doctrine, a hidden metaphysical reality beyond the conditions of the nexus of life, or the myth of one coherent and continuous metaphysical tradition of universal conceptual thinking (Hegel, Husserl) or the thinking of metaphysics and being (Heidegger, Derrida, Rorty) stemming from Hellas and culminating in Western modernity that has become global yet to which Asians and others remain outside and external except to the degree that they become “universally human” (as Husserl asserted) by becoming Western.

Confucianism: Too noble for Europe? Another way of interpretively disregarding the relevance of non-Western forms of thinking is to elevate them above and beyond Western philosophical discourse. Confucianism, Daoism, and Zen Buddhism—to mention the lineages discussed in the course of this book—can be construed as too subtle and noble for modern alienated Western humanity that has philosophy because it lacks a more genuine way of thinking and experiencing the world. There are advocates of Confucianism in the West and East who deny that it can be comprehended

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by or as philosophy, since this would entail its denigration to estranged dualistic Western thinking or the pathologies of modern Western civilization. Martin Buber and Helmuth Plessner risk excluding Confucianism through its elevation. They, like Misch, recognized the ethical and spiritual core at work in Confucian philosophy in the turbulent period of 1920s Germany. Similarly to Bertrand Russell’s comparison of Chinese and Western culture in The Problem of China (1922), in which Chinese happiness is favorably contrasted with the alienated and obsessive Western struggle for power and success, Buber concluded—in the last years of the Weimar Republic in Buber’s 1928 lecture “China and Us” that Confucian ethics was ethically too noble and demanding, as well as inevitably culturally inappropriate, for a Europe dominated and endangered by its lust for power and struggle for existence. In The Belated Nation (1935), his early critique of National Socialism and the German conditions that made it possible, Plessner praised Confucian autonomy and culture while arguing for the impossibility of a second or new European Confucianism due to its Christian faith and alienated industrial organization of life.58 Plessner and Buber praise while rejecting the transportability of Confucian teachings. In Buber’s “China and Us,” the encounter between Chinese practical wisdom and modern European reality cannot occur through Confucian philosophy for the following reasons: it is (1) too morally idealistic for modern European sensibilities absorbed by the quest for power and success, (2) impossible to realize in a European context because Confucian ethics presupposes a particular culturally rooted understanding of family relations and relationship between the living and the dead that is lacking in the West, and, finally, (3) inadequate to the fundamental problematic of modern European civilization: the restless unfettered drive for power, progress, and accumulation.59 Buber construes Confucianism as an interconnected fusion of the universal and particular, such that its universal message cannot be disconnected from its Chinese contexts and transported into and adopted in another cultural matrix. Buber’s conclusions in this regard can well be questioned as the transmission of Confucianism has already been long underway in pre-modern East Asia and across the globe in modernity.

Buber’s Confucius: Between particularism and pluralism Buber’s elucidation of Confucianism has its flaws and limitations insofar as it intermittently involves claims reminiscent of the Oriental despotism thesis

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in inaccurately identifying Confucianism with the absorption of the ethical into the political, and the subordination of the individual to the state. Buber adopted such a reading in his later essay “Society and the State” (1951), where he contrasts in an exaggerated fashion what he considers to be the hierarchically imposed order from above of Confucian political society with the spontaneous and organic free association of individuals that he discerns in the Daodejing 䘧 ᖋ㍧.60 Confucianism is associated with an external social-political order, while Daoism is identified with individual autonomy and ethical freedom. However, in the course of the same essay, Buber identified Confucius with Socrates. Both figures are construed as primary exemplars of pedagogical philosophers who emphasize the ethical cultivation and reformation of spontaneity, revealing his inconsistent position concerning Confucianism across his works. Confucianism is interpreted as both an external authoritarian social-political imposition on the individual, perhaps inspired by a certain reading of Xunzi 㤔ᄤ and Confucianism’s bureaucratic social-political role in Chinese history, and as an internally motivated ethically and pedagogically oriented way of life.61 Although Buber expressed his own reservations concerning the merits of Daoism and Confucianism over his career, he critically confronted Rosenzweig in a correspondence during the 1920s concerning the latter’s condemnation of Daoism and Confucianism in The Star of Redemption. Buber states that these philosophies cannot be easily dismissed, as the “Daoist is no pagan,” and we must attend to the Confucian modesty with respect to heaven, or God as Buber, following Richard Wilhelm, translates tian: Chinese reticence concerning God—“He who transgresses against tian,” says Kong [Confucius], “has no one to whom he can pray.”62

Confucius, Buber continues to maintain in the Eclipse of God (first published in English in 1952), acts with humility toward others and heaven, without resentment or complaint, at the same time as only God (tian) actually understands him.63 Buber envisions Confucius in dialogue with others and heaven while speaking “of himself almost as unwillingly as of God.”64 Buber’s understanding of religion is a variation on the expressivist account of religion. Religious expression should not be understood as an abstract universal category that is strictly cognitively or conceptually knowable in its particular exemplars, as if there were an underlying religious law or truth that transcends all its concrete and singular incarnations. Rather, Buber suggests, religious expression is unique and singular as it is intrinsically bound to the concrete existential situation that it expresses.65 Religious anti-universalism does not

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entail in Buber’s account a particularism that would not exclude or devalue other particular forms of religiosity. In this sense, and in contrast with his friend and collaborator Rosenzweig, Buber’s pluralism allows him to interpret Confucianism as both humanistic and religious, albeit too lofty in its vision of ethical life for Europeans to follow and put into practice. The affinities between Confucius, Buber, and Feuerbach concerning the primacy of the “I–thou” relationship and the dialogical inter-relational character of human nature is noted by the Reformed theologian Karl Barth. Barth comments, in the context of his denial of the need for interreligious dialogue and with a sense of the superiority of his own religious commitments, that the humanitas of humanistic religiosity can be elicited from “quite different quarters, e.g., the pagan Confucius, the atheist L. Feuerbach, the Jew M. Buber.”66 Barth is concerned with demarcating the uniqueness and height of Christian revelation from these diverse spheres. Buber responded to Barth’s comments in the afterword, “The History of the Dialogical Principle,” to the 1965 edition of Between Man and Man, remarking: “I cannot engage myself in this connection for the exalted, but to me somewhat alien, Confucian teaching or for the more anthropologically postulative than originally humane teaching of Feuerbach.”67 In Buber’s description of the history of the dialogical principle in his thought, Confucian ethics is yet again—echoing his claim about it being too lofty made four decades earlier in “China and Us”— kept at a distance in being “exalted.” His early explorations of Laozi and Zhuangzi that played—as will be discussed in Chapter 4—a role in the development of I and Thou are left unmentioned. Buber’s position vis-à-vis Confucianism was inconsistent. However, his best attempts at interpretation recognize its communicative and interpersonal otheroriented character. Why was Confucius perceived to be a dialogical humanistic thinker of the “I-thou” relationship in such moments? The Analects is an example of dialogical philosophy for Buber and the Confucian discourse of benevolence can in particular be explicated as intrinsically dialogical and relational. It will be helpful at this point to consider this question by turning to another German thinker of this period who underscored the communicative character of the Confucian ethos.

Karl Jaspers: Confucius as a paradigmatic individual thinker The psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) primarily engaged with Asian philosophy after the Second World War. He wrote about Confucius in the postwar era as part of his theory of the “axial age” in Vom Ursprung und

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Ziel der Geschichte (1949; English: The Origin and Goal of History, 1953) and his portrait of paradigmatic thinkers in Die maßgebenden Menschen: Sokrates, Buddha, Konfuzius, Jesus (1957; English: Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus: The Paradigmatic Individuals, 1962). Jaspers’s 1949 work postulated, as part of his philosophy of history written in the shadows of Hegel’s teleological conception of history and the devastation and loss of the Second World War, a decisive period of the mutually independent coemergence of higher levels of post-mythical human consciousness in philosophy in the diverse milieus of China, Greece, India, Israel, and Persia. These are not identified with primitive mythical thought but have their own rationality and reflectiveness concerning the human condition. Philosophy is consequently not intrinsically and exclusively Western as it was for Husserl or Heidegger (see Chapters 5 and 6). His approach to non-Western thought is closer to that of Misch in seeing in it multiple forms while, at the same time, embracing their inner unity in kinship with the idea of a perennial philosophy. Jaspers echoes older premodern conceptions of philosophy in a modern form by understanding it, as we saw in Misch earlier in this chapter, as an expression of the human condition. It is a basic quality of humans as communicative individual animals to question, reflect, and seek understanding and meaning. Jaspers privileges philosophy’s Western development—interpreted as a progressive achievement of science and technology, liberty and individuality, and historical consciousness—in this and his other works on the philosophy of history. Jaspers elucidated in the 1957 work the “fundamental” teachings of Confucius. He wrote in a letter to Hannah Arendt concerning this work that one goal was to protect Confucius from his Sinological banalization and the other to show the fruitfulness of his thought.68 According to Jaspers’s portrait, communication as the “life element” of human nature in Confucian thought: “Ren is humanity and morality in one. The ideogram means ‘human’ and ‘two,’ that is to say: to be human means to be in communication.”69 That is, ren ҕ contains the radicals for human (ren Ҏ) and two (er Ѡ), implying the mutuality of human nature, sociality, and the ethical compartment of benevolence. The Analects presents ren both descriptively as a fundamental aspect of human nature and prescriptively as its normative ideal that human behavior typically fails to realize. Jaspers justifiably notes the fundamental ethos of ren in the Analects and Confucian philosophy. He envisions ren not only communicatively but more mysteriously as the “encompassing”—Umgreifende, a central concept in his thinking of existence—all-embracing “source of the absolute untainted with experience” that gives customs, habits, and laws their measure and value.70 It

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is an elusive notion, as Jaspers notes. What then is ren? Analects 12:2 defines ren as “loving people” (airen ᛯҎ), a teaching with universal scope that even a Western philosopher might potentially comprehend. Jaspers, in contrast to Buber, emphasized the universality of the Confucian teaching of benevolence, and—due to this universality rooted in the communicative nature of humanity—maintained that, unlike Jesus and the Buddha who an average Westerner could not authentically imitate: “Socrates and Confucius point to pathways that we too can travel, though not as they did.”71 Jaspers’s image of Confucius is not that of a mystic, prophet, or saint. There is no revelation or prophecy; Confucius expresses and enacts the encompassing through community and communication. His reverence for heaven and respect for ghosts and spirits primarily has an ethical function rather than religious character.72 Confucius is accordingly a Socratic-like thinker who reflects on the situation of life, critically investigates and seeks the truth, and resolutely chooses and lives the good life.73 The Confucian teaching can be adopted in diverse cultural milieus for Jaspers in that it seeks a moral transformation that it attuned to the moral capacities of human nature. Confucius’ teaching remains pertinent as it seeks to mold and build a world by renewing the principles of the past, rooting the new in the old without allowing the past to stifle the present.74 The norms of antiquity are orientational; they are to be acquired, made the present’s own, and enacted anew.75 Our contemporary situation is one of fashioning a world, in relation to multiple pasts, in negotiating a complex multicultural context of diverse and conflicting claims. Jaspers’s sympathetic reconstruction attempts to do justice to Confucius as a philosopher with universal significance. It has its boundaries inasmuch as it perpetuates the myth of the great original individual thinker who stands separate from and is misinterpreted by the subsequent degenerate “dogmatic” institutionalized tradition.76 Following the philosophy of primordial origins, which Jaspers interprets psychologically and individualistically in contrast with Heidegger, Jaspers supposes that the individual thinker must have been greater than the subsequent fallen tradition that could only have persisted with the inspiration of a great original source.77 Along with the language of communication and the encompassing, Jaspers employs an existentialist rhetoric of decision, will, and resolute individuality in the face of the either-or of one’s existence to describe these eminent thinkers that are distant to them. This interpretive strategy allows Jaspers to appreciate the paradigmatic universality of non-Western philosophers—he also wrote of the Buddha in the same volume of The Great Philosophers as well as Laozi and

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Nāgārjuna in the third German volume on “origin-orientated metaphysicians”— to an extent by separating them from the concrete institutionalization and transmission of their teaching.78

Confucian philosophy as intercultural philosophy It is clearly inadequate to interpret the European reception of Confucianism as a welcoming hospitality toward the other or as purely a free exchange of ideas unaffected by the asymmetrical power relations between Europe and China. It is also inadequate to construe this history as a purely ethnocentric, racist, and colonial European construction of the other, as if others had no agency and subjectivity of their own, given the complex histories of this reception that encompass intersecting “internal” European contexts and “external” exchanges and that undermine the reductive and idealized image of a self-enclosed Europe. A more adequate historical model is called for that can critically engage their and our own hermeneutical situation. Intercultural hermeneutics is in need of an adequate and appropriate model of the relationship between the universal and the particular, and the normative and the historical, than is evident in the writings of the philosophers considered above, including the sympathetic readings of Buber, Jaspers, Misch, and Popper-Lynkeus. The particularity of Confucianism, as emphasized by Buber, need not present an unbridgeable abyss, as it did for Buber and previous German thinkers, if its universal ethical scope can be integrated and particularized in other forms of life. Such a vision of the transportability of Confucian teachings has been advocated in “Boston Confucianism.”79 If the portability of Confucian values and norms across diverse cultural contexts can indeed be the case, and perhaps this is only possible in the late modern conditions of the West, then Buber is overly pessimistic concerning the West’s capacity to learn from and adopt Confucian teachings at the same time as he claimed that it should learn from it in open communicative exchange. Intercultural exchange can lead to adopting other perspectives as well as seeing one’s own perspective in a transformed light from adopting the perspective of the other. This mutuality, reciprocity, and reversibility is discernible in the elementary Confucian principle of shu ᘩ that is an ethical and interpretive task—with a trans- and intercultural import—to practice as a guiding idea in relation to others. As argued in Chapter 3, and which can only be briefly mentioned as an example here, early Confucian ethics—as articulated in the “Four Books” (Sishu ಯ᳌)—

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the Analects, the Mengzi ᄳᄤ, Practicing the Mean (Zhongyong Ёᒌ), and the Great Learning (Daxue ໻ᅌ)—can be reconstructed as a situated critical model for social and individual self-reflection that indicates a significant alternative to the impasse between the two dominant models of contemporary Western ethical thought: the abstract universality and justice of Kantian deontological ethics and Hegel’s communitarian vision of the dense interwoven bonds of ethical life that mediate the struggle for recognition. Confucian philosophy remains a living ethical reality in diverse cultural milieus and can itself be a source for an intercultural sense of appropriateness and diagnostic and therapeutic reflection on the relational dynamics between self and other.

Conclusion This chapter has traced moments in the reception, interpretation, and critique of elements of Confucian philosophy in modern German thought with an eye toward the problems and possibilities of conceptualizing an intercultural hermeneutics that has a reflective, diagnostic, and critical dimension that offers pathways to confront social-political and epistemic-discursive injustices. Comparative and intercultural interpretation and reflection are often caught in the dilemma of either (1) presupposing the primacy of one discourse in order to interpret others, often precluding critical reflection on itself and genuine dialogue with the other or (2) a relativistic multiplicity that entails the abandonment of reflection, critique, and argumentation between discourses that allows for the evaluation and rejection of divergent and competing claims. This account has indicated how the interpretations of Confucianism articulated in particular by Misch and Buber, within their own conditions and limits, offer a suggestive response to concerns about unity and multiplicity and building blocks toward a genuinely intercultural and intertextual hermeneutics that is capable of navigating between identity and difference, the universal and the particular, and absolutism and relativism. Chapters 2 and 3 will continue the interrogation of the hermeneutical and intercultural significance of German philosophical responses and non-responses to Confucianism.

2

The Problem of Life in China and Europe: Zhang Junmai, Eucken, and Driesch

Introduction The presupposition of the autonomy and isolation of Western philosophy is an illusory product of the asymmetrical relations of power, exchange, and communication characteristic of the colonial and postcolonial eras. The idea of one Enlightenment and one modernity, as distinctively Western, has been promoted by its Western advocates and critics. For instance, in Husserl and Habermas as well as in Heidegger, Derrida, and Foucault, there is only one— Western—form of reason that has overtaken and encompassed the globe in modernity. This current work is a contribution to the critique of European reason, or—more precisely—the Eurocentric conception of rationality, for the sake of disclosing—to decolonize and pluralize a thesis from Husserl and Habermas and, in its own form, Confucian ethics—the rationality and selfreflective critical potential within the myriad concrete forms of ethical life and materially and communicatively reproduced lifeworlds. In the colonial and semi-colonial regions of the world, the problem of multiple Enlightenments, modernities, and rationalities was a pressing concern that has remained basically invisible to Western philosophy. The problematic of “Western” and alternate modernities, however, forced itself with violence upon twentieth-century Chinese intellectuals, as considered in this chapter. The chapters of this book illustrate how “Western” and “Eastern” philosophical discourses have already been interculturally intertwined for generations. The history of the German Confucius (Kongzi ᄨᄤ) is, as Chapter 1 revealed, a knotted series of intercultural encounters and mis- and non-encounters. The German philosophical reception of Confucianism intersects and overlaps with modern Chinese appropriations of German philosophy and reinterpretations of Chinese intellectual discourses, as explored in this chapter on the hybridity of

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modern philosophy through the asymmetrical yet evocative interaction between the young Chinese philosopher and political thinker Zhang Junmai ᔉ৯ࣅ (Carsun Chang, 1886–1969) and the older German philosophers Rudolf Eucken (1846–1926) and Hans Driesch (1867–1941). In this chapter, we examine the openness to encountering Asia and Asian philosophy in the philosophical works and cross-cultural activities of Eucken and Driesch and how, in Zhang’s encounter with German philosophy, one can trace how modern Chinese thought was not merely passively Westernized. Western thought was actively adopted, modified, and Sinicized in the context of a new hybrid intercultural discourse such as the discourse of a modern “new” Confucian philosophy as a philosophy calling for intuition into and selfreflection on “life” (shengming ⫳ੑ). The primary topics of this chapter are Zhang’s encounter and dialogue with the practical neo-idealist Eucken (in Part one) and neo-vitalist Driesch (Part two), the reformulation of his initial enthusiasm for life-philosophy in relation to Kantian and Confucian thought, the later development of Zhang’s philosophy, and the implications of Zhang’s encounters and interpretations for intercultural philosophy (Part three). In addition, the interest of Eucken, Driesch, and related German figures (Wilhelm, Lessing, Jung, and Keyserling) in the Chinese way of thought and life, which was interpreted as a potential source for renewing crisis-ridden Western modernity, is discussed in the context of the interpretive situation of the Weimar Republic.

Part One: Zhang, Eucken, and Life-Philosophy Zhang’s intercultural contexts: Modernity, colonialism, and the crisis of life Sweeping Western influences and a new cosmopolitan vision of Chinese cultural and social-political life were adopted in different stages during the Republican era in China from the “New Culture” movement (xin wenhua yundong ᮄ᭛࣪ 䘟ࢩ), beginning in the late 1910s, to the “New Sensation” school (xin ganjue pai ᮄᛳ㾎⌒) that flourished in the 1930s in semi-colonial Shanghai. The threat of the Western powers colonizing China and broader processes of Westernization brought with it a deepening sense of a multifaceted crisis in Republican China. This sense of crisis encompassed multiple dimensions: (1) the crisis of the meaning of life evident within Western modernity itself, (2) the crisis of a

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threatened sense of traditional Chinese identity, (3) the economic and material crisis of deep economic and social-political inequalities overseen by a corrupt and inefficient political regime, and (4) the crisis of military intervention and occupation by the Western powers and subsequently Imperial Japan. The sense of a crisis of meaning was adopted through the translation and interpretation of the Western critics of modernity. It was interpreted through the reception of continental European life-philosophy and existentialism in opposition to the growing influence of technocratic pragmatism and scientism of Anglo-American thought. This is evident in Zhang’s heated debates in the 1920s with the Anglo-American-oriented intellectuals who promoted the abandonment of Chinese traditions and advocated absolute faith in science, technology, and Westernization that was associated with Americanization (meiguo hua 㕢೟࣪). The iconoclastic radicalness visible in Westernizing intellectuals and the May Fourth Movement that sought to extinguish the Chinese past, and was in some ways a precursor to the Cultural Revolution, was not uniform among the Anglo-American-oriented intelligentsia. Although regarded as the leading voice of the movement against tradition and an active critic and opponent of Zhang, the Columbia University educated Hu Shi 㚵䘽 (1891–1962) gradually moved away from advocating radical Americanization toward interpreting liberal democratic Enlightenment thought in relation to a renewal of Confucian li ⾂ (ritual propriety) and de ᖋ (virtue) as constituting a socially oriented “ritual Enlightenment,” which would adjust and correct the univocal conformity and one-sidedness of the Western idea of Enlightenment in relation to local conditions and traditions.1 The crisis of Chinese identity in the face of the overwhelming power and apparent “universality” of Western civilization is visible in Zhang’s early works and in those of other Republican era thinkers such as Hu Shi and the philosopher and historian Gu Jiegang 主䷵࠯ (1893–1980). Another illustration of the problematic of modernity in China is visible in the analysis of the imperial function of Western internationalism and universalism by the anti-colonial nationalist leader Sun YatSen ᄿ䘌ҭ (1866–1925). This anxiety in the face of the sinister side of Western universalism as a vehicle of domination is expressed by Sun in his 1924 lecture “Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism,” published in Sanmin zhuyi ϝ⇥Џ㕽 (The Three Principles of the People); the cosmopolitan vision furthers the interests of the stronger party (e.g., the colonizing West) against the weaker party (e.g., the colonized peoples) who require an appeal to their own particular self-interests and national particularity to actively resist their oppression.2

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The Western powers and their Westernizing Chinese servants claimed that cosmopolitanism was inevitably progressive and modern, even as the “opening” of Asia meant its domination and exploitation by imperial powers pursuing their own nationalist self-interests in the “civilizing” cosmopolitan guise characteristic of international empires. Sun noted in this context how earlier Chinese Confucian thinking was cosmopolitan and imperial. The cosmopolitan imperial version of Confucianism allowed traditional China to rule over other non-Han nationalities and to be ruled by non-Han peoples in turn under the Mongolian Yuan (1271–1368) and the Manchu Qing (1644–1912) dynasties. Cosmopolitanism is consequently an advantage of empires and a flaw for weak vulnerable peoples. Traditional Confucian cosmopolitanism, like all cosmopolitanisms, is a double-edged weapon for Sun: it could function as an imperial ideology to assimilate other peoples or prepare the way for the Han people’s subjugation under the Qing dynasty or modern China’s status as an exploited “hypo-” or “semi-” colony that calls for a progressive anti-cosmopolitan and nationalist response. Without a sense of national identity that is capable of resisting Western colonial cosmopolitanism, the Chinese and other oppressed peoples of the earth were heaps of “loose sand” (yipan sansha ϔⲸᬷ≭) unable to resist the exploitation of their cosmopolitan oppressors. Real asymmetries of power demand that the weak affirm themselves in their particularity, in patriotism and nationalism, in order to resist their oppression. The Western universal ideologically conceals its actual particularity and the genuine possibility of universality rests in the resistance of an oppressed people as a concrete particular. In the same semi-colonial context in which Sun confronted the overwhelming power of the ostensive universality of the West, early twentieth-century Chinese and East Asian philosophy developed in confrontation with Western ideas of universality, of rational science vis-à-vis life-intuition, in the context of either abandoning or reviving indigenous conceptions of knowing from Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism. The emerging field of academic philosophy centered on debates between the priority of the scientific knowledge and rational civilization of the West and the intuitive experiential knowing and organic forms of life of the East. As “intuition”—translated in Chinese as zhijue Ⳉ㾎 or, less frequently as unmediated perception, zhiguan Ⳉ㾔—was deployed to distinguish Eastern and Western modes of experiencing and thinking, the varieties of intuition (perceptual, life-experiential, intellectual, mystical) accordingly marked a key concern for early twentieth-century Chinese thinkers who fused insights and arguments from modern European and traditional Chinese discourses.

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It is in this complicated hybridized context that Zhang, who studied classical Chinese and subsequently modern Western philosophy in Shanghai, Waseda University in Tōkyō (1906–1910), and the University of Berlin (1913–1915), would encounter and collaborate with the German life-philosophers Eucken, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1908 and was the teacher of Max Scheler, and the neo-vitalist experimental embryologist and philosopher Driesch. Eucken and Driesch are currently forgotten figures who were influential in their own generations and attracted the attention of East Asian intellectuals because of their modernistic critiques of modernity. As discussed in Chapter 1, philosophers such as Buber and Misch stressed the ethical humanism and personalism of Confucian teachings. Buber developed this account in the language of a humanistic religiosity and Misch in the language of enlightened hermeneutical life-philosophy. This chapter continues this thematic by turning to the humanistic life-philosophical interpretation of Confucianism and Chinese culture developed in the 1920s in writings of Zhang, Eucken, and Driesch; in particular, the idea of a humanistic cultivation of life that was unfolded in response to the crises of modernity in Eucken’s and Zhang’s coauthored work, published in German in 1922, The Problem of Life in China and Europe (Das Lebensproblem in China und Europa).3 Eucken and Zhang would interpret in this work the Confucian concept of dao 䘧 as humanity, alluding to the statement in the Analects (Lunyu 䂪䁲) that the human broadens the Way instead of the Way broadening the human, and the concept of de ᖋ as justice.4

Zhang, Eucken, and the Chinese and European cultivation of life Zhang, his mentor, China’s leading intellectual of the time, Liang Qichao ṕଳ䍙 (1873–1929), and the military expert Jiang Baili 㫷ⱒ䞠 (Jiang Fangzhen 㫷ᮍ䳛, 1882–1938) visited Eucken on a study tour of Europe organized by Liang from 1918 to 1920.5 They met Eucken in his home in Jena in late 1919 or on New Year’s Day in 1920, the date differs in different accounts, to arrange translations of his works into Chinese.6 In retrospect, Zhang noted in his account of this meeting how he found Eucken particularly moving because of his recurring gesture of holding his heart in his hands while addressing how spiritual life emerged from material life and how this encounter inspired him to study philosophy instead of international politics.7

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Eucken already had an existing awareness of East Asia and Asian philosophy prior to his collaboration with Zhang. He had been invited and planned a trip to China and Japan in 1914, which was prevented by the outbreak of the First World War. He expressed hope in engaging in intellectual exchange with Eastern thinkers in his autobiography Lebenserinnerungen: Ein Stück Deutschen Lebens, translated as Eucken, His Life, Work and Travels (both appeared in 1921).8 Eucken stressed his concern for the common problems of humanity and the human—rather than merely German—condition; presumably speaking in this way because of his activism on behalf of Germany during the war that he justified as a form of critical patriotism and that had negatively impacted his reputation in the Anglo-American world. Eucken’s attention to Asian thought, he mentions his interest in Buddhism in particular in his autobiography, is depicted as part of a vision of the need for a spiritual renewal of inner life in face of “the danger of a merely active civilization.”9 Eastern thinkers, such as the Buddha whose thought has affirmative redemptive tendencies for Eucken in addition to the pessimistic world-denying elements stressed by Schopenhauer and Weber, are perceived as exemplars and sources for spiritual transformation and renewal in his reflections on religion.10 Spiritual revitalization is a desirable response to the crisis of modernity that has weakened life and unleashed and intensified brutality and force in mass societies and mass wars.11 The modern situation does not require a return to the premodern in Eucken’s assessment, nor for cultural pessimism about the decline of Western civilization; rather it calls for inner renewal and spiritual revolution under modern conditions. “Spirit” (Geist) is understood in a Hegelian fashion as the media or mediated realities of language, law, science, and religion; the very forces that increasingly spiritualized and moralized animal human existence had fallen into crisis in modernity. The dehumanizing technological age unleashed humanity’s self-interested and competitive egoism and its coercive brutality against other humans.12 Eucken’s concern with the renewal of life under the material and spiritual crisis conditions of modernity is also visible in his coauthored work with Zhang, in which the Confucian way, along with the practically oriented “activist” idealism of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel, offers a point of departure for the present.13 It is the emphasis on morally oriented activity and its inherent rationality that distinguished Eucken’s “affirmative” life-philosophy, informed by an anti-dogmatic liberal Protestantism and emphasizing personal moral improvement and struggle, from the cultural pessimism and irrationalism of popularized or “vulgar” life-philosophy, associated with Ludwig Klages (1872–

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1956) and Oswald Spengler (1880–1936), which permeated German culture during the Weimar Republic. With the ruination of the modern shattering of tradition, which had served the reproduction of human life for generations, there will be—according to Eucken—either the destruction of humanity or a new spiritual transformation and advance that integrates spirit, technology, and nature. Eucken concludes in his late autobiographical work that reciprocal aid, communication, and exchange between and across peoples are required for the fullness and richness of life and its renewal.14 It is this elderly idealistic and liberal nationalist philosopher, described by the young Max Horkheimer in 1926 as an epigone and shadowy remainder of the classical idealist lineage, who is struck in the early Weimar Republic by the need for cross-cultural dialogue and interaction and pursues a mutual intellectual exchange with Zhang.15 Zhang portrays his meeting with Eucken—and with Henri Bergson—as inspiring his growing attentiveness to contemporary European life-philosophy and his collaboration with Eucken who he describes as a close philosophical mentor during their months together in Jena.16 Eucken noted in the same book that Zhang, who he calls a sympathetic professor from Beijing, remained with him for four months and that he was interested in classical German idealism, Eucken’s own activist idealism, and less so in his Christianity.17 They co-wrote The Problem of Life in China and Europe during this period. This work focuses— no doubt through Zhang’s contribution to the work—on Confucian rather than the Buddhist practical philosophy that Eucken mentioned in his memoirs.

The problem of life in China and Europe Eucken and Zhang thematize in The Problem of Life in China and Europe the thirst and need for renewal through a new practical philosophy that synthesizes the idealist core of German and Chinese philosophy and the cultures of East and West.18 Eucken describes the work in his preface as a conversation (Zwiesprache) between Europe and China, which allows each to speak with its own voice, on questions of the formation of life (Lebensgestaltung) and how best to live.19 On the one hand, Zhang and Eucken contend that the Chinese (in this context, primarily Confucian Chinese caught in the turmoil of Westernization and modernization) teaching of life requires breaking with its passivity and national isolation to achieve a greater level of activity and confidence in engaging the wider arena of the world. In this regard, the authors point to German Idealism as a movement of practical ethical activism that highlights both worldly and

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intellectual engagement and possibilities for dynamic transformation and renewal. Nonetheless, on the other hand, modern Western thought and culture are themselves disoriented by structural conflicts and crises. Europeans are in need of learning from the ethical clarity, simplicity, and sincerity of Confucian teachings. These aspects of Confucian philosophy indicate an ethical height and nobility of spirit that avoid the pitfalls of the modern Western false dilemma of choosing between either modernistic atheistic utilitarianism or ossified traditions, dogmas, and theological thinking.20 China, they contend, continues to be a source for furthering practical moral-political Enlightenment in the West just as it was a paradigm in early modernity for Leibniz and Wolff.21 The first part of The Problem of Life in China and Europe is a brief outline of the history of Western philosophy, the second part an overview of the history of Chinese ethics, and the third part a diagnostic reflection on the contemporary ethical-social situation in China and Europe. Despite its flawed interpretations of the past and answers for the present, this book is in many ways exemplary for intercultural philosophy in endeavoring to draw together diverse philosophical perspectives in a critical and diagnostic way that addresses contemporary philosophical and practical concerns. While modern German philosophy has for the most part emphasized an abyss-like separation between Greece and Asia and the non-Western world, as is investigated further in the thinking of Husserl and Heidegger in Chapters 5 and 6, Eucken and Zhang note the openness of ancient Greece to Asia and how Europe was shaped by Christianity, an Asian religion fused with Greek philosophy.22 They perceive affinities between early Greek and Chinese thinking, particularly in their Socratic and Confucian moments, as critical reflection concerning the individual and social-political formation of life through selfcultivation and moral government. Chinese and Greek philosophy, particularly in their Confucian and Socratic forms, share an affinity in that they both aim at promoting the rational enlightenment and ethical renewal of practical life. Eucken and Zhang, as is also evident in the cases of Misch considered in Chapter 1 and of Driesch discussed below, did not embrace an irrational and intuitive “life-philosophy” and an Orientalist vision of an enchanted mystical or more natural East. They rather, to give a fairer assessment of their works, construed life-philosophy as a culmination of a rational reflection that does not abandon practical life and the historical situation for the sake of either a purely theoretical attitude or a calculative instrumental and pragmatic abasement of rationality.

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What is at stake here for Zhang and Eucken is the nature of reason itself and its role in human life. This raises a significant question for intercultural philosophy: is rationality only a feature of modern Western theoretical and calculative meansends thinking or can it be found in manifold ways in all, including traditional non-Western, forms of life and communication? To interculturally expand and transform the more limited monocultural arguments concerning the lifeworld found in Husserl and Habermas, the external Western irrationalization and colonization of non-Western forms of life and thought corresponds with the internal modern irrationalization and colonization of the lifeworld and ethical life.23 It is this situation that helps clarify how Zhang could consider himself (1) a proponent of the internal rationality of traditional Chinese philosophical discourses and forms of life, and (2) an advocate of the growing role of the sciences and Western philosophical reflection in modern China while, at the same time, (3) opposing the “complete” or “wholesale” Westernization (quanpan xihua ܼⲸ㽓࣪; i.e., the ostensive modern rationalization) of Chinese life as well as positivistic and scientistic interpretations of the sciences (a topic that will be resumed below).

A Chinese reading of Eucken’s philosophy of spirit Zhang describes the two prevailing philosophical tendencies of the current epoch as those that have thinking as their point of departure and those that have life as their point of departure (Lebensphilosophie; shengming zhexue ⫳ੑ૆ᅌ) in his 1921 essay “An Outline of Eucken’s Philosophy of Spiritual Life” (“Woyikeng jingshen shenghuo zhexue dagai” ‫؁‬Ӟ䦫㊒⼲⫳⌏૆ᅌ໻ὖ).24 Both tendencies, he argued, are discernible in Descartes’s conclusion in the Meditations: “I think therefore I am” (cogito ergo sum). In rational doubt and reflection (the “I think”), one is led back to that which cannot be doubted: one’s own life (the “I am”) as a point of departure and touchstone for thinking.25 Zhang appealed to Nietzsche, James, and Bergson in his argument that life-philosophy situates thinking in life and lived-experience (Erleben), which is the domain where truth takes place and is meaningful, in contrast to the intellectualistic tendencies that separate experience and truth, and subordinate life to abstract cognition. Both of these tendencies, however, are one-sided; German idealism and Eucken’s activist idealism, in contrast to mere life-philosophy, disclose the interconnection of life and reason, situating thinking in its life-nexus without reducing it to bare life.26

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Eucken’s work Cognition and Life (Erkennen und Leben) indicates how life can be lost in the pursuit of concepts and how conceptual cognition (Erkennen) needs to be rooted in its life-context.27 But what is this “life”? Zhang critiques Eucken at this point, suggesting that he remained within the boundaries of Kant’s critical philosophy and poses the question to him of where life and its value arise and of what this life consists; he asks Eucken to clarify an adequate conception of life and responds to this question for Eucken by noting his ethical-religious conception of life that differentiates it from James’ psychological and Bergson’s biological interpretations of life.28 Eucken is unusual among life-philosophers in conceiving life in relation to the transcendent rather than thinking it solely within the confines of this-worldly immanence. Zhang situates Eucken’s philosophy in the historical context of the emergence of positivism, Darwin’s evolutionary theory, and industrial society in the nineteenth-century. Eucken resembles a kind of prophet for the sake of life, revealing how life is not merely a servant of biological instincts and impulses to be employed by a destructive technological civilization.29 Zhang links the thinking of life in Bergson and Eucken in the next passages of this essay through a discussion of Bergson’s favorable introduction to the French translation (Avant-propos pour Le sens et la valeur de la vie, 1912) of Eucken’s 1907 work: Der Sinn und Wert des Lebens (translated into English as The Meaning and Value of Life, 1909).30 They are two giants of contemporary thought and advocates of “spiritual ontology” (jingshen benti ㊒⼲ᴀ储) for Zhang. Eucken’s contemporary significance lies in particular in his discourse of “spiritual life” (Geistesleben; jingshen shenghuo ㊒⼲⫳⌏) that defines what it means to be appropriately human.31 The idea of “spiritual life,” which is a fusion of German life-philosophy and Chinese traditional discourses about life, would be a contested notion during the Republican and early Communist eras in China. Zhang would in his subsequent thinking define the Confucian task of cultivating humanity and spiritual life as the realization of human autonomy and spiritual freedom (jingshen ziyou ㊒⼲㞾⬅). Zhang explicates Eucken’s The Philosophy of Life of the Great Thinkers (Die Lebensanschauungen der grossen Denker, 1890) as asserting that “spiritual life” means to expand from a small to a great self. It lies in the human heartmind (renxin Ҏᖗ) and yet it is not limited to human beings. It extends and encompasses all life and spirit as such, and God. Eucken rejects the adequacy of either intellectualism or naturalism for adequately interpreting spiritual life. This argument includes, despite the Hegelian lineage of Eucken’s notion of spirit,

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rejecting Hegel’s philosophical system for exaggerating the role of reason and theoretical life over practice and active life.32 Zhang published at this time, in a classical Chinese translation that makes Eucken sound Confucian, Eucken’s letter written to him in Jena on November 12th, 1920.33 The letter notes that the most important task of the present is the combination of Chinese civilization and modern Western thought through communication. Insofar as the modern West is a culture of force (Kultur der Kraft), which hinders the cultivation of the human heart-mind (renxin) in Zhang’s translation that is Confucianizing through his choice of words, China confronts the difficult task of balancing the modern Western will for domination and external power and the traditional Chinese emphasis on the humane cultivation of the self and human relationships in forming a new common ground between East and West.34 Eucken perceives new possibilities for philosophy and practical life in engaging in intercultural dialogue, the formation of new relationships and communities, and in the new East-West hybrid philosophies of life emerging in China that transcend the stratified privilege of the West in the modern Western philosophical tradition. Eucken’s conservative philosophy of spirit, which appeared antiquated and outdated for Horkheimer and other German intellectuals of the 1920s, took on a different more radical tone in the Chinese context insofar as it indicated avenues of active defiance, resistance, and transformation. Eucken’s message of “affirmative” ethical activism was pertinent for Zhang in a semi-colonized China threatened by the reductive forces of Western modernity and by the continuing encroachment of colonial powers; a China in need of social-political engagement and spiritual transformation and reconstruction (jingshen de gaizao ㊒⼲ⱘᬍ䗴) from within. Eucken’s emphasis on the heart, the role of the affects in morality, and ethical action in practical life resonated with, and can be explicated in light of, the ethical tradition of Mencius (Mengzi ᄳᄤ) and Wang Yangming ⥟䱑ᯢ, which Zhang interpreted as a movement of an ethically motivated and reform-oriented idealism of action.

The modern rebirth of Confucianism from the spirit of Kantianism The prospect of a living Confucianism adequate to modern Chinese conditions and experiences was a persistent question for Zhang. Zhang was skeptical of

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discourses of the comparative superiority of Eastern and Western civilizations in his article “The Crisis of European Culture and the Tendency of New Culture in China” (1922).35 Echoing the articulation of autonomy in Kant’s essay “What is Enlightenment?,” Zhang argued for the emancipation of the self from false restraints. Individual and collective effort and action are decisive for reshaping the present in China. However, he recognized that contemporary Western civilization is itself deeply shaped by intensifying crises that it is unable to manage or resolve, and thus cannot resolve on behalf of China. There are three contributing factors to the contemporary crisis of the West: (1) a philosophical crisis of reason that has been truncated by positivism and undermined by growing irrationalism, (2) a social structural crisis of capitalist society that demands greater democracy and social-political equality, and (3) the lingering effects of the human catastrophe of the First World War. Zhang criticized in this article the work of Liang Shuming ṕ┅⑳ (1893– 1988) Eastern and Western Cultures and their Philosophies (Dongxi wenhua ji qi zhexue ᵅ㽓᭛࣪ঞ݊૆ᅌ). This work developed the idea that there are three cultures identified with the West, India, and China. It naively defended in Zhang’s assessment the superiority of Confucian China, contending that the declining West required spiritual salvation from the East, without adequate recognition of the East’s present precarious historical situation and the corruption endemic in Chinese social life. Zhang argued further that Liang, despite his resistance to the West, has already conflated and can no longer adequately distinguish traditional Chinese and modern Western ideas. Liang interpreted Eucken’s and the Confucian idea of life as both signifying “spiritual life” in the same way. Zhang remarked that although they are the same expression in Chinese (jingshen shenghuo), they have different connotations. Eucken’s conception of life is religious, transcendent, and universal in scope. It is Christian and presupposes the assumptions developed in the course of the history of Western philosophy. The Confucian idea of life is primarily ethical, immanent and this-worldly, and belongs to concrete everyday existence. In 1922, Zhang, a pioneer of the new Confucian movement as discussed later in this chapter, rejected the “old” Confucian idea that traditional Confucian philosophy and practice are sufficient for contemporary Chinese ethical and spiritual life. It was questionable for him how traditional Confucianism could save China from its plight much less save the West as Liang contended. Zhang would develop in subsequent years a modernized form of Confucian philosophy that integrated elements of Western and Eastern thought and practice for the sake of a transformation of Chinese conditions.

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The differences between Chinese and European conditions have led scholars to stress the incommensurability between the Western Enlightenment and the impossibility of a corresponding Chinese Enlightenment. Vera Schwarcz and Wei Zhang have discussed how the European Enlightenment was primarily a cultural and philosophical project and the Chinese May Fourth Movement of 1919 a political event.36 This movement, and the intellectuals associated with it, could not break with or overcome local Chinese social-political conditions. The May Fourth Movement’s cultural iconoclasm, modernistic nationalism, and reform-minded anti-traditionalism mirrored while being incapable of forming the conditions of cultural-political Enlightenment under Chinese conditions. Zhang’s New Confucianism is a response to the impasses of Chinese modernity. He articulates a modern Confucian philosophy that has learnt from and is open to learning and adopting from Western modernity, in particular from Kantian philosophy and liberal-constitutional and social democratic political thought, in the formation of a distinctive Chinese modernity achieved through a form of enlightenment suited to its own conditions and needs.

Part Two: Zhang and Driesch between Republican China and Weimar Germany Hans and Margarete Driesch in Republican China After his collaboration with Eucken, Zhang returned to China and promoted German Idealism (particularly Kant and Hegel), social democratic political and economic thought, and the neo-idealistic and the neo-vitalist life-philosophies of Eucken, Driesch, and Bergson in his writing, teaching, and public lecturing. Zhang’s mentor Liang Qichao founded the Chinese Lecture Association (jiang xue she 䃯ᅌ⼒) that invited Bertrand Russell, Hans Driesch, John Dewey, and Rabindranath Tagore to lecture in China between 1920 and 1924. These lectures were major cultural events that were well received among Chinese intellectuals. Zhang and Liang had initially invited Eucken to China. He declined due to his advanced age and they hosted instead, with Eucken’s encouragement, Driesch’s visit to China for nine months during 1922–1923.37 Zhang reports in his 1922 article on Driesch, which summarizes Driesch’s thought for Chinese audiences prior to his visit, that its significance lies in its break with the abstractions of NeoKantianism and his articulation of the “living I.”38 Zhang glosses Driesch’s biological and logical works and focuses on his dynamic conception of the self as well as his “methodological solipsism,” which was an important source—along with Driesch’s

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system of logic called a theory of order (Ordnungslehre)—for the early Rudolf Carnap’s Logical Formation of the World (Der logische Aufbau der Welt, 1928). At a conference held at the conclusion of Driesch’s stay in Beijing, Zhang described how he was interested in Driesch’s philosophical project insofar as it promised to unite life-philosophy and science by providing an “idealist foundation” for contemporary scientific and experimental inquiry.39 Zhang emphasized that Driesch’s philosophical importance resides in his scientifically oriented critique of Darwinism and associational psychology as well as in his conception of ideality (rationality) as allowing for a holistic explanation of the interconnectedness of the whole and its parts.40 Driesch offered Chinese intellectuals an alternative holistic paradigm for philosophical-scientific inquiry in contrast with the previous two recent philosophical visitors to China, Bertrand Russell and John Dewey.41 Zhang then turned to address the common problems of China and Germany, two countries both threatened by crisis and peril.42 In addition to Zhang’s lecture, Driesch himself and the Sinologist Richard Wilhelm, among others, would give lectures at this farewell event.43 During his nine months in China, which the spouses Margarete (née Reifferscheidt, 1874–1946) and Hans Driesch retrospectively described as an especially happy time in their life, Driesch lectured at the National Southeastern University (೟ゟᵅफ໻ᅌ) in Nanjing and Peking University (࣫Ҁ໻ᅌ) on Kant, the philosophy of the organic, contemporary philosophical tendencies, and problems of modern psychology.44 Qu Shiying ⶓϪ㣅 (1901–1976) (alias Qu Junong ⶓ㦞䖆) worked as Zhang’s assistant during Driesch’s visit. Qu was the first Chinese person to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard University, which he received in philosophy a few years later in 1926. Driesch describes becoming friends and interlocutors with Zhang and Qu, thanking them both in the preface to The Far-East as Guest of Young China (Fern-Ost als gäste Jungchinas, published in German in 1925) and his Fundamental Problems of Psychology: Its Crisis in the Present (Grundprobleme der Psychologie: Ihre Krisis in der Gegenwart, 1926) written on the basis of his lectures in China.45 Driesch also wrote his Theory of Relativity Theory and Philosophy in 1923 (Relativitätstheorie und Philosophie, 1924) while in China at the request of Zhang. In this text, which was dismissed by physicists as a merely philosophical critique, he argued for the logical incoherence of the theory of relativity.46 Zhang translated Driesch’s critique of Einstein’s theory of relativity, a critique with which he disagreed, in the hope of fostering a Chinese debate that failed to emerge.47 Hans and Margarete Driesch consider in their co-written work about their time in China from October 1922 to July 1923, The Far-East as Guest of Young

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China, whether Europeans can have a more adequate view of relations in East Asia to replace the old myths and prejudices.48 The work was not composed as a scientific work nor as “a travel dairy of a philosopher,” a reference to the popular work of Hermann Graf Keyserling (1880–1946), The Travel Diary of a Philosopher (Das Reisetagebuch eines Philosophen, 1919) that employed the style of a travelogue as a point of departure for varied philosophical reflections.49 Despite this disavowal, the couple engaged in philosophical reflections about their experiences in China as well as reflections on Chinese philosophy, religion, and culture. They describe the goal of their book in loftier terms, in opposition to German nationalism and fascism, as furthering political enlightenment concerning the German relationship with the world and indicating how Germany does not stand alone in isolation from the world.50 The internationalist message of this work also informed Margarete Driesch’s other work based on her experiences abroad and correspondence with women throughout the world, Women beyond the Ocean (Frauen Jenseits der Ozeane, published in 1928), which gathered contributions from contemporary female voices from Africa and Asia.51 The Drieschs’ cosmopolitanism is palpable in Hans Driesch’s political activism against militarism and nationalism after his return to Germany. It stands out in an epoch of growing nationalist resentment that would lead a few years later to the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the National Socialist assumption of power in 1933.

Cosmopolitanism, politics, and race: Zhang and Driesch Zhang, who engaged in writing and politically organizing on behalf of realizing democratic socialism in China, was politically to the left of the liberal nationalist Eucken and the moderate social democrat Driesch. Zhang was a critic of Marxism and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP, Zhongguo gongchandang Ё೟݅⫶咼). He was involved in the leadership of various social democratic parties and publications. His social democratic vision for China, influenced by German social democrats such as Philipp Scheidemann and deemed idealistic and utopian by his communist critics, was of a mixed economy mediated by liberal rights and constitutional government. His political activities and leadership brought him into conflict with the two dominant Chinese political forces, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT, Zhongguo guomindang Ё೟೟⇥ 咼) and the Communist party, which eventually forced him into American exile near the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949.

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Eucken had opposed socialism in Der Sozialismus und seine Lebensgestaltung (1920; published in English in 1921 as Socialism: An Analysis). Eucken’s philosophical fellow traveler Driesch was a cosmopolitan, pro-democratic, anticolonial, and (together with Theodor Lessing) anti-militaristic pacifist and antinationalistic thinker.52 Driesch was a leading figure in the “League for Human Rights” (Liga für Menschenrechte) during the Weimar Republic, warning Germany in political speeches of impending dictatorship. Because of his political activism against the National Socialist movement, Driesch became the first non-Jewish professor to lose his university position in National Socialist Germany. He was forbidden to engage in political speech and activity by the new regime. Isolated and silenced in National Socialist Germany, and marginalized in academic life, Driesch dedicated his last decade to the study of paranormal psychology and the occult in what has been interpreted as either a withdrawal from social-political life or “as a form of oppositional politics,” as Driesch himself suggested in his autobiography (Lebenserinnerungen) written in 1938 and posthumously published in 1951.53 The philosophy and ideology of racial categorization and hierarchy were prevalent in Western and Eastern, conservative and liberal, intellectual and social-political discourses of the early twentieth-century. It is noteworthy, given the contemporary revival of racialist and nationalist ideologies that serve as a reminder of their destructive influence in the first half of the twentieth-century, that Zhang and Driesch were both critical of the use and validity of the concept of race while employing the categories and concepts of their times. In the case of Zhang, unlike other notable East Asian intellectuals of the time, he explicitly rejected using notions of race and common blood to define the Han people, opposing the racial categorization of the Han as a group with one unique ethnic lineage or identity.54 He argued in his political writings of the 1930s such as The Scientific Foundation for National Revival (1935) and The Chinese Culture of Tomorrow (1936) that the Han people were already a mixture of peoples with myriad origins and that Han identity was one of a common culture, language, and ethical life.55 The issue of race is more complex in Driesch because of the German situation and the subsequent reception of his work. In another twist to his story and the eclipse of his philosophy during and after the National Socialist era, Driesch has been linked in later sources with the National Socialism he actively opposed because of his ostensive contributions—as an irrationalist, holistic, organicist, and vitalistic life-philosopher—to the ideological fermentation and background that led to its assumption of power and the deployment of his biological holism and vitalism in some National Socialist discourses.56 This is an ironic fate given

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Driesch’s resistance to racism, Social Darwinism, and the idea of a “struggle for existence,” which formed crucial parts of his opposition to the Darwinian explanation of evolution, and his argument that biological holism undermined the thesis that there could be isolatable determinative racial characteristics. Driesch opposed the Darwinian model of conflict and struggle that was appropriated in racial and National Socialist thinking; biological organisms and their evolution reveal an entelechy, a teleologically structured process, toward wholeness, harmony, balance, and proper environmental functioning in Driesch’s account. His argumentation for anti-mechanistic vitalism did not appeal to forms of pure or primordial intuition and feeling as sloppy overly generalizing intellectual histories of the Weimar Republic would have it; it was a philosophical inquiry into the fullness of entelechic psychoidic life inspired by the philosophical tradition of Aristotle, Leibniz, and Goethe. Driesch’s notion of life, as well as Zhang’s use of the notion of life in the 1920s, encompassed cooperation, communication, and rationality; it was opposed to a model—reflecting the alienation of capitalist society more than nature itself—of relentless competition, conflict, and struggle in which only the biologically superior survived. Hans and Margarete Driesch claimed that their work The Far-East as Guest of Young China aimed at encouraging the “understanding among the nations and races.”57 Such understanding was possible as there is no abyss or impossibility of communication between peoples, such as Germans and Chinese, based on racial characteristics. They express doubts about the value of notions of “race,” and racialized conceptions of peoples and nations.58 They furthermore rejected the prevalent racial discourse of the “yellow peril,” stemming from the East against the West, as a myth.59 This discourse of an Asian physical or spiritual threat to the Western world occurs in popular and philosophical Western portraits of China (some of which are discussed in Chapters 1 and 7), as the anxiety and fear of a “yellow peril” has shaped modern Western misunderstandings of China.60 The racial idea of a “yellow peril” critiqued by Driesch had its origins in the early Western encounter with East Asia and intensified with the Western colonial intrusion in East Asia.61 The German Kaiser Wilhelm II utilized the idea of a “gelbe Gefahr” in 1895, purportedly based on a nightmare of the Buddha riding a dragon conquering Europe, to justify and excuse European imperialist excursions into China. The German-Baltic physician and writer Hermann von Samson-Himmelstjerna published in 1902 The Yellow Peril as a Moral-Problem (Die gelbe Gefahr als Moralproblem) with the pro-imperialist “German Colonial Publishing House” (Deutscher Kolonial-Verlag).62 China was perceived as a threat to Western civilization because of the advanced character of Chinese

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civilization and the inability of the West to fully transform China into a pure colonial subject state. The Austrian social Darwinist and racialist philosopher Christian von Ehrenfels (1859–1932), a student of Franz Brentano and Alexius Meinong and a forerunner to Gestalt-psychology, constructed an image of a “yellow peril” based on sexual anxieties about Asians. Ehrenfels asserted in his writings concerning the philosophy of sex that East Asians would sexually outcompete Europeans through higher rates of reproduction and consequently overwhelm the Aryan race.63 Ehrenfels warned Western men against the seductive powers of Asian women. The fear of the “yellow peril” is frequently correlated with fears of “Asiatic” Bolshevism, as in the writings of the social theorist Karl A. Wittfogel and as will be traced further in Chapters 6 and 7 in relation to Martin Heidegger, Henri Massis, and Arthur Koestler. The philosopher of the alterity of the other, Emmanuel Levinas, could speak in the 1950s—in a discussion of the threatening specter of Chinese communism—of the “yellow peril,” while denying that he is using this explicitly racial concept in a racial way, as a “spiritual” threat endangering the West.64 A number of German thinkers rejected racial thinking and the idea of a “yellow danger” from the East in the 1920s. Driesch’s friend Richard Wilhelm called it an empty phantom conjured up by European bad conscience (“Keine ‘gelbe Gefahr’, das inhaltsleere Gespensterphantom des europäischen schlechten Gewissens”).65 Hans and Margarete Driesch challenged the discourse of “racial hygiene” and its myth of a Chinese racial threat to the West. They reject thinking of race in these terms and, in response to the image of a “yellow” take-over of the West, pointed toward the pacifism active in Chinese intellectual traditions and the tolerance of diverse intellectual and religious perspectives and ways of life visible in Chinese society. Chinese ethical life is in some ways (scientifically and technologically) behind and in other ways (ethically) ahead of European life. They furthermore describe the much more real existing threat of the “white menace”: that is, the reality of the Western colonial expropriation of Asia, including the Western powers encroachment on China in wars waged for special rights and concessions, such as the British right to sell opium, and in plundering and destruction.66 Driesch published, a couple years after his departure from China, a short piece in 1925 in the German-Jewish Newspaper CV-Zeitung (Central VereinsZeitung: Blätter für Deutschtum und Judentum), posing the question in his title: “Können Rassen einander Verstehen?” (“Can Races Understand Each Other?”). The CV-Zeitung had published a series of contributions on race with an eye

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toward the “Jewish question” in Germany in 1925. The question in Driesch’s, itself naively phrased—as David Wertheim notes—in racial language, was one of urgency for German-Jewish citizens faced with the intensification of German Nationalism and anti-Semitism during the Weimar Republic that would lead to the persecution and annihilation of National Socialist Germany.67 Driesch formulated the dilemma of the German-Jewish situation in the 1920s in the following way: if different races can understand one another, then there can be cooperation and dialogue between them. German-Jews could as Jews flourish in Germany. But if races cannot understand one another, if there is a basic incommensurability between peoples based on racial characteristics, or an intractable ethnocentric a priori (as discussed in Chapter 5), then—Driesch warns sensing the devastation German nationalism can unleash—German-Jews need to find other ways of flourishing in recognition of the impossibility of such mutual understanding.68 Driesch presented this as two alternative possibilities in which he hoped for reconciliation in a multiethnic Germany. Popper-Lynkeus, discussed in Chapter 1, and other German language Zionist authors had already concluded—given the harsh realities of German racialist hostility—that Jews could only survive and flourish with the foundation of their own nation state and by becoming a people with a homeland like any other people. Driesch critiqued in this short piece the racialist idea that peoples are “entirely other” (völligen andersein) from one another living in incommensurably different worlds with different truths.69 Based on his experiences in China, his work with Jewish intellectuals, as well as other reasons, Driesch contended that there is no difference of essence, nature, or substance between Eastern and Western peoples, nor can there be one between Germans and Jews. He noted how he experienced China not as a tourist but first-hand as a guest. He describes how he could recognize through daily communication and interaction the personality, the ideas, and moral life of Chinese persons. Chinese discourses, institutions and practices are he claimed both recognizably characteristically Chinese (and so distinguished from other cultural milieus) and, at the same time, understandable by the non-Chinese who experiences and learns them: some practices are to be criticized and changed (such as, notably, the treatment and status of women) and others learned from and emulated (such as the Confucian moral sensibility). There are difficulties communicating across diverse cultures and languages, but there is no racial or cultural ethnocentric a priori that makes communication and mutual life in principle impossible. Germans and Chinese, and Germans and Jews in Driesch’s article, not only can in the future but already have repeatedly communicated and understood

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one another. German elite and popular cultures were already positively shaped by a long history of German-Jewish interaction, and Germans and Jews had formed new communities and forms of life together.70 Employing a common yet problematic tactic that highlights prominent Jews to counter anti-Semitism, Driesch emphasizes in particular the role of Spinoza in the formation of German philosophical (Schelling and Haeckel) and poetic culture (Goethe) that German nationalists identified as uniquely German. Driesch concludes with the following considerations. If there is no essential biologically or naturally based difference between races, then mutual understanding and common life are possible even if there are (1) no unified or underlying truths or discourses known by all peoples, (2) radical differences in worldview and perspective, and (3) conflicts produced by the closure of religious and cultural systems through which other persons are perceived to be the radically alien “other.”71 The most radical differences between peoples cannot justify the racialist notion that peoples are either biologically or incommensurably distinct in essence or in principle. There are a number of concerns with his argument and its context. Driesch pluralizes and relativizes but does not reject the idea of race as such. The very need to make such arguments against racial thinking for interracial mutuality leads readers to sense the ominous racist context in which they are presented and the ineffectiveness of his critique. A people—such as the Germans inspired by racialist and nationalist ideology—could imagine and act as if there were a difference in essence between themselves and others such that possibilities for mutual understanding and common human life are short-circuited and destroyed. The growing nationalistic and racial fervor of Weimar Germany would increasingly undermine Driesch’s cosmopolitan hopes in intercultural communication and the formation of new multiracial and international communities that would draw on and allow for dialogue between all persons with their varying cultures and traditions.

Driesch: Chinese thinking and East-West unity Hans and Margarete Driesch reflected on the Chinese language and ways of thinking in a Leibnizian vein in their work. They are impressed, for instance, by the logical character of the Chinese language in which, as in modern formal logic, each object is a thing.72 Leibniz was correct in their view to refer to the Chinese writing system in his conception of the universal characteristic with

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its dyadic yes/not yes, 0/1, structure. This modern logical structure is visible in simple colloquial Chinese expressions such as have/have not (you mei you ᳝≦ ᳝) or good/not good (hao bu hao དϡད).73 Their portrayal of Chinese society highlights its intellectual and religious tolerance. There are multiple forms of Chinese religious life encompassing ancestral and natural spirits, Confucian, Daoist, Buddhist, Islamic, Christian, and atheistic beliefs and practices. This diversity makes it impossible to speak of one Chinese national religion or to steer society though religious means or institutions.74 There is accordingly a certain modernity, interpreted as secularization, to Chinese society that is in contrast still undeveloped in the West. The authors discuss Daoism and Confucianism throughout their book both as religions and as philosophies, differentiating ways in which these are interpreted and practiced in the Chinese environment. To briefly summarize, they maintain that Daoism alone is in an authentic sense a religion. They adopt a typical narrative of the era favoring “philosophical” over “religious” Daoism: Laozi and Zhuangzi are perceived in their account as articulating a pantheistic-mystical philosophy that was reductively flattened out to a religion of spirits in later religious Daoism with its focus on natural and ancestral spirits.75 Confucianism, however, is an ethical system of exceptional depth and purity rather than a religion per se. It is grounded in essential concepts of trust, sincerity, duty, and authority. Confucian philosophy is linked by association with the popular “religion” of the ancestor cult due to its moral and pedagogical value. Confucian moral teachings infuse and structure all of Chinese life, in a way that no Western practical philosophy has achieved, even while Confucian education, philosophy, and temples are predominantly for the elite Mandarins and literati class.76 The final chapter of Fern-Ost als gäste Jungchinas concerns “The Unity of West and East,” based on Hans Driesch’s lecture at the farewell event in Beijing organized by Zhang and his colleagues in honor of his departure from China.77 Driesch commences by stating how he initially undertook his journey to the East in the spirit of Nietzsche’s portrayal of the “good European.” Nietzsche employed this idea in his arguments against German nationalism and patriotism. As a good European, Driesch articulates a critique of Europe, mentioning its destructive tendencies toward global murder and robbery, while praising the mutual understanding evident among its intellectual tradition that embraces, among others, the participation of French, Italian, British, Jewish, and German intellectuals.78 He accordingly expresses his own closer affinity with French pacifists than with German nationalists. Nevertheless, he notes how elite intellectuals cannot be disconnected

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from vulgar uneducated cultures, as is evident in the historical interconnection between anti-Semitism and the German idealism of Fichte and Hegel.79 Driesch describes how through the international thought-portraits of Keyserling, which are described in the next section below, and his own sojourn in China, he recognized that the perspective of being a “good European” is itself inadequate—not because it is “too wide,” but because it is “too narrow” and still too near to nationalism in restricting its vision to Europe.80 On the one hand, there is narrow nationalism that is inadequate to addressing the other; on the other hand, Driesch notes, there is the superficial romanticism and consumption of the “new,” “foreign,” and “wholly other.” Arabs, Hindus, and Chinese are grasped and reified as “totally other,” and depicted as using completely different concepts or even no concepts at all, and as possessing a special truth and wisdom inaccessible to alienated Western humanity. Neither perspective, neither the nationalist nor the Orientalist, risks genuinely encountering and engaging what that “other truth” might in fact be.81 Driesch next poses the question: is there a difference of essence between East and West? His answer is no: not because the East has now been incorporated into Western modernity, and has adopted the study of the natural sciences, nor because the West is now learning to study the psychoidic and—using argumentation familiarized by Carl Jung—“the psychic unconscious” in all of its forms, including “parapsychology.”82 If there were a real difference in essence between the two, East and West could not encounter and learn from one another, each adopting what is better in the other and rejecting what is worse in themselves; that is, learning in a Confucian way through others’ merits and one’s own faults. The already existing history of intercultural exchange entails that there is no incomprehensible abyss between Eastern and Western forms of thinking and living. If the West is currently asymmetrically in the superior position to the East, it is not due to its nature or essence. Adopting another Confucian teaching, there is no intrinsic superiority between humans by nature; there is only a differentiation of human nature through education and formation (Bildung). The West’s current position is due to its cultivation of education and the critical consciousness unfolded in modern critical philosophy.83 The peoples of the East, notably in China and Japan in Driesch’s account, have realized the nature of the European advantage and are now endeavoring to appropriate Western means and discourses and surpass the West in the formation of a new culture.84 The new emerging culture in China is not only an appropriation of Western theories and practices but also an adaptation

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and reinterpretation of Chinese traditions, in particular Confucian ethics that is in many ways superior to Western morality. Even if the West has its Kant, who is like Confucius for Driesch as well as Zhang, customary morality and moral reflection are more deeply embedded in the structures of Chinese ethical life.85 This is reflected in Chinese intellectual life: Western intellectuals are primarily militaristic and nationalistic. Chinese intellectuals are more noble, to the point of exaggeration, in their commitments to tolerance, pacifism, and cosmopolitanism. While Western intellectuals theorize, Chinese intellectuals cultivate themselves.86 Echoing Leibniz’s portrayal of an “exchange of light” a few centuries earlier, it is not only the East that can learn and adopt from the West, the West is also in need of recognizing and learning from the East in a new community of mutual exchange, learning, and understanding.87 Addressing the problematic of universalism and particularism in undoubtedly overly optimistic claims, Driesch maintains that nationalism cannot prevent in the end the realization of the unity of humanity—the harmony of the part and the whole—which alone allows each particular to genuinely be itself. Each nation, he concludes, is capable of recognizing and adopting what is best and true from other nations: Kant does not only belong to Germany nor Confucius solely to China.88 The European and Chinese intellectual traditions—the latter with its cosmopolitan elucidation of tolerance, peace, and harmony, which he contrasts with the “religious dogmatism” of the Islamic, Hindu, and Christian worlds— have already helped to prepare the way for a greater human community and, Driesch adds, one unified democratic and pan-ecumenical international state.89 The exchanges between Zhang and Driesch can be interpreted as a suggestive exemplar for intercultural philosophy and hermeneutics. Driesch’s approach to East-West understanding remains suggestive in that it fostered a sense of intercultural encounter, dialogue, and interpretation. Driesch’s language expresses an openness to encountering and learning from the other, despite the fact that it is unfolded in a problematic discourse of unity in his final Beijing lecture and in an overly naïve, optimistic, and idealizing way that is shared by other Weimar-era cosmopolitan German intellectuals whose discourse is outlined in the next section.

Weimar Confucianism and Weimar Orientalism Driesch is not the only Weimar-era intellectual to articulate a vision of East-West unity. The engagement of Eucken and Driesch with the East, as well as figures

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such as Buber and Misch considered in other chapters of this work, occurs in the context of the development of German Orientalism and a broad array of German interpretations of Chinese discourses. The short-lived crisis-ridden Weimar Republic saw a fascination with the Orient in a Germany isolated in Europe, as Driesch noted in his Beijing lecture on “The Unity of West and East.” The German Orientalism of the 1920s continued and reshaped the Orientalism of turn-of the-century Jugendstil in its openness to being influenced by Asia in more than merely ornamental ways. German-language writers such as Brecht adopted East Asian motifs, images, and elements in their writing, seeing in it a naturalness and spontaneity of emotional and expressive life in contrast to the alienated artificiality of Western modernity. German intellectuals such as Wilhelm, Lessing, and Keyserling (who each had political or intellectual relations with Driesch) argued for opening the West to the East in a new spirit of learning, adopted teachings from Asian philosophies, and called for Asians to retain and reinvent their own intellectual and cultural discourses in response to the forces of Westernization. There are three additional significant figures in the Weimar Republic who advocated the importance of Chinese and Eastern philosophy for the West. They should be briefly discussed to help understand the context of the German reception of China in the 1920s. The first figure is the highly influential Sinologist and translator Richard Wilhelm (1873–1930). He initially traveled to China as a Protestant Christian missionary in 1899 and would return to Germany as a missionary of Chinese philosophy. Wilhelm translated Chinese classics such as the Analects, his famous edition of the Yijing ᯧ㍧ that has been translated into multiple Western languages, and the Zhuangzi 㥞ᄤ. Wilhelm—who likewise shared the idea of the affinities between Confucius and Kant—worked together with Hans Driesch, Zhang Junmai, and Qu Shiying on a German-English-Chinese philosophical dictionary during Driesch’s visit to China in 1922–1923.90 They describe in the preface the idea of a “fusion” (ronghe 㵡ড়) uniting Eastern and Western philosophy that would serve as the basis of a new common philosophy of humanity.91 Wilhelm promoted the study of China through directing the China Institute at the University of Frankfurt from 1925 to 1932, which hosted Chinese intellectuals (such as the Buddhist Tai Xu ໾㰮, the poet Xu Zhimo ᕤᖫᨽ, and the philosopher Hu Shi) and interacted with German intellectuals (notably Buber and Jung) in encouraging the study of China in the German speaking world.92 The Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung (1875–1961) described, in his forward to the second 1938 German edition of the work, the decisive

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development of his phenomenology of a structural collective unconscious that occurred through his reading of Wilhelm’s translation of the early Qing Daoist alchemical work The Secret of the Golden Flower (Taiyi Jinhua Zongzhi ໾Э䞥 㧃ᅫᮼ) in 1928. Wilhelm himself unfolded the idea of a structural “collective humanity,” informed by a particular reading of Kant, which revealed itself in Chinese philosophy in The Soul of China (Die Seele Chinas: Geburtswehen einer neuen Zeit, 1926), arguing that there are no inherent restrictions on the potential of Europeans to learn and adopt from the teachings of Confucianism or Daoism.93 Wilhelm critiqued Western prejudices concerning Chinese culture and thought such as the myth of a despotic uniformity and monolithic conformity. Wilhelm was criticized by establishment Sinologists for being too sympathetic with his subject matter and too enthusiastic for the Chinese. He undoubtedly interpreted Chinese philosophical traditions through the lenses of German Idealism, repeatedly rediscovering the German philosophical and humanist tradition of Kant and Goethe in Chinese Confucian and Daoist incarnations, enthusiastically describing the Analects as a Chinese critique of practical reason and the Zhuangzi as an epistemic critique of the boundaries of reason. Driesch and Wilhelm both expressed optimism in their works about China from (respectively) 1925 and 1926 and their sympathy toward the development of a “new” or “young” progressive republican China that was fusing together traditional Chinese thought and culture with a new democratic and scientific spirit adopted to their own circumstances. The second figure who should be mentioned in this context is Theodor Lessing (1872–1933), a German-Jewish life-philosopher and anti-nationalist writer assassinated by the Nazis in Czechoslovakia in 1933, who collaborated with Driesch in the anti-fascist “League for Human Rights.” Lessing accentuated the wisdom of the East as the source of Greek and Western philosophy and as an orienting point for a battered and decayed modern Western civilization in his popular work Untergang der Erde am Geist (Europa und Asien) [The Dawn of the Earth by the Spirit (Europe and Asia)] that was published in four different editions between 1918 and 1930. Lessing inverted German virtues by identifying Germany and the West with alienated spirit (Geist), artificial culture (Kultur), and the impersonal external social organization (Gesellschaft); and Asia with rootedness in the earth (Erde), naturalness (Natur), and organically interrelated community (Gemeinschaft). HansGeorg Gadamer later described the emancipatory impact of Lessing’s book on his generation: it was a “second rate” work that had a revolutionary effect

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in the 1920s in displacing and reorienting its previously provincial European perspective of the world.94 A third significant figure writing about Chinese and Eastern thought during this period was Keyserling an anti-democratic and pro-aristocratic life-philosopher who was—despite some initial fascination with the personality of Hitler—opposed to National Socialism and forbidden to speak publically and travel abroad after the Nazi seizure of power. Keyserling published the popular work The Travel Diary of a Philosopher (Das Reisetagebuch eines Philosophen) in 1919.95 In what might now be called public philosophical writing, Keyserling’s work deployed travel descriptions and personal experiences as touchstones for philosophical reflections, conjoining Western and Eastern philosophical sources to engage contemporary issues and conditions such as the mechanization and technization of life and death. Thus, for instance, he reflects on the naturalness and spontaneity of Cook Ding (Pao Ding ᑪϕ) from the “Nourishing Life” (yangsheng zhu 仞⫳Џ) chapter of the Zhuangzi in the context of the mechanization of animal butchery in the Chicago stockyards.96 Keyserling uses this work of travel-philosophizing through Egypt, Sri Lanka, India, China, Japan, and the Americas to propose that the West ought to be open toward and learn from the East, in particular the aristocratic societies that alone heighten the mind and enable high cultures, and for the East to renew its own aristocratic traditions for the sake of its present life. Keyserling encouraged the idea of an elite aristocratic global culture that would draw on all philosophies, religions, and cultures, transcending ethnocentrism and nationalism that he associated with the masses and the popular will. Keyserling argued in the chapters on China that Confucianism, which he admired for its capacity to heighten and complete moral character, faced a paradoxical situation in modernity: the potential for contemporary Chinese renewal (Erneuerung) must occur in relation to Confucianism, and this possibility is accordingly interlinked with the revitalization of Confucianism. In Keyserling’s analysis, the form of existing Confucianism had paradoxically become a philosophy hindering the very renewal that Confucian sources could alone bring about in Chinese life.97 After his return to Germany, Keyserling founded the “School of Wisdom” (Schule der Weisheit) in Darmstadt in 1920 to encourage the study of Eastern and Western philosophy as wisdom traditions, hosting scholars such as Leo Baeck, Nikolai Berdyaev, Driesch, Jung, Scheler, Tagore, Ernst Troeltsch, Wilhelm, and Leopold Ziegler.98

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Frank-Lothar Kroll has examined how German intellectuals interested in engaging Chinese and Asian philosophy and culture were among the opponents and victims of National Socialism.99 Their cosmopolitan and universalist projects, whether conceived of in progressive (Driesch) or conservative (Keyserling) terms, came into conflict with radical racial and nationalist ideology of National Socialism. As will be seen in Chapter 7, in relation to the Western reception of Zen Buddhism, there was also an engagement with the East by thinkers connected with National Socialism. There is the complicated case of Heidegger as well as the National Socialist commitments of Eugen Herrigel, a philosopher who taught in Japan in the 1920s and who wrote the popular work Zen in the Art of Archery (Zen in der Kunst des Bogenschiessens) first published in German in 1948.100

Part Three: The Development of Zhang’s New Confucianism Zhang and the modernization of Confucianism We will consider in the following sections how Zhang articulated a new philosophical version of Confucianism informed by his interpretation of Chinese and European thought that emerged through his interaction with the German philosophical scene. Adopting Confucian, German Idealist, and life-philosophical—in part inspired by his interpretation of Eucken, Driesch, and Bergson—arguments, Zhang contested the new Chinese faith in the West and Westernization in the “debate between scientism and metaphysics” (kexue yu xuanxue lunzhan ⾥ᅌ 㟛⥘ᅌ䂪᠄), held between Zhang and the geologist Ding Wenjiang ϕ᭛∳ (1887–1936) in 1923, and the related “debate between science and life” (kexue yu rensheng guan zhi zheng ⾥ᅌ㟛Ҏ⫳㾔П⠁) or worldview controversy between scientism (kexue zhuyi ⾥ᅌЏ㕽) and “view of life” (rensheng guan Ҏ⫳㾔).101 Ding, who also participated in Liang’s study trip in Europe with Zhang, was unimpressed by the European life-philosophers. The positivistic and pragmatistoriented Ding and Hu Shi attacked Zhang’s lecture. Ding, who Zhang still called a friend during Driesch’s visit, aggressively critiqued and mocked Zhang’s commitments to Chinese philosophy and Western anti-positivism, accusing him of plagiarizing Bergson and Driesch, and arguing for the worthlessness of traditional Chinese thinking and the necessity of embracing a fully scientific civilization that went beyond its imperfect realization in the West.102

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Ding indicted Zhang for following fashionable European irrationalist lifephilosophy, and polemically called his thinking xuanxue ⥘ᅌ (after the “dark learning” of Wei-Jin 儣ᰝ Neo-Daoism) instead of zhexue ૆ᅌ (philosophy). Zhang has been subsequently misinterpreted in descriptions of this debate as an anti-modern and anti-Western traditionalist.103 Such accounts assume that anti-scientism is not as modern as scientism, and that science is—Ding argues— an absolute fact and value, disregarding Zhang’s argumentation concerning the limits of scientific knowledge, which cannot adequately address questions of a meaningful practical life, and their hybrid European-Chinese intercultural context.104 At stake in these debates is the idea of rationality itself and how expansive or limited human reason can be. Ding identified rationality with the West, whereas Zhang perceived other forms of rationality to be operative in Chinese discourses. The debate between Zhang and Ding, and their supporters and allies, involved the nature and scope of scientific method and a free intuitive form of life and, by implication, “complete Westernization” or the possibility of Chinese renewal and an appropriate adaptation of science, technology, and modernity within a broader vision of aesthetic-ethical life. Zhang’s philosophical writings fused Neo-Confucianism and German idealism in ways that would shape twentieth-century Chinese philosophy and inform his active social and political engagement for the sake of a modern social democratic and, humanistically interpreted, Confucian China. In Zhang’s estimation, traditional China, and in particular Confucianism, is not only a problem in need of being eliminated and overcome by adopting Western modernity, as the more radical tendencies associated with the May Fourth Movement contended. If they are thought in an active and global way, Confucian norms offer a needed answer to the modern crisis of meaning and value within the Chinese context and in the wider arena of the world, which has lost its spiritual bearing and orientation in the modern Westernized form of life.105 In the context of the debates of the early and mid-1920s, Chinese philosophy is interpreted as practically oriented life-philosophy instead of theoretically oriented intellectualist philosophy. This is a position that he modifies as he increasingly perceives the role of practical rationality in Chinese forms of thinking, and their closer affinity to Kant than to the European life-philosophy of Eucken, Driesch, and Bergson from which he subsequently distanced himself. Contrary to the description of his early critics, Zhang is not a conservative or a traditionalist. He promoted constitutionalist and German social-democratic ideas in his political philosophy and practice. He utilized these Western sources

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in forming a renewed egalitarian vision of Neo-Confucianism inspired by his interpretation of the Chinese tradition of ethical engagement extending from Confucius through Wang Yangming to its modern renewal. In his political, legal, and economic works that increasingly occupied his concern from the late 1920s through the late 1920s, Zhang endeavored to establish an ethical-political institutionalization of the Way (liguo zhi dao ゟ೟ П䘧) to achieve a new “middle way” between universalism and particularism, communism and nationalism in his political writings from the 1920s until his exile from communist China. In response to the modern “problem of life,” Zhang adopted strategies from Chinese (primarily Neo-Confucian) and German (from Kant to Weimar Republic Social Democracy) sources to renew threatened Chinese cultural identities while promoting a modern democratic and nontotalitarian vision of social-political equality. Zhang endeavored to articulate both the spiritual and progressive political dimensions of the Confucian tradition. He attempted to integrate a modernistic Enlightenment-oriented Confucianism, German philosophy and social democratic theory, and democratic socialist politics as a “third way” alternative to the Nationalist and Communist parties in China from the 1920s to the 1940s and in his later American exile where he published works in English such as The Third Force in China (1952) and a comparison of Indian and Chinese political developments in China and Gandhian India (1956).106 Zhang remained a critic of the nationalist and communist governments in Taiwan and mainland China in the United States where he published in English classic accounts of Neo-Confucian philosophy: The Development of Neo-Confucian Thought (1957/1962) and Wang Yangming: Idealist Philosopher of Sixteenth-Century China (1962).107 Zhang is best known today in the West for these later works in English on Neo-Confucianism and Wang. Wang is interpreted, in a way that echoes his earlier position in the 1920s but no longer with references to German life-philosophy, as an ethical idealist and thinker of practical reason advocating the unity of knowledge and practice (zhixing heyi ⶹ㸠ড়ϔ).108

From Eucken to Kant: Zhang’s later reflections on the problem of life Zhang revisited his early relationship with European life-philosophy and the worldview and science debate of the early and mid-1920s in his later article “My

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Philosophical Thoughts” published in the journal Zaisheng ‫( ⫳ݡ‬The National Renaissance; more literally, “rebirth”) in June 1953.109 He wrote that he returned to China after his period in Germany with a commitment to ideas of free will, the free cultivation of individuality, and the human capacity to transform itself to promote happiness and well-being.110 He describes how Hu and Ding declared war against him after his speech on the necessity of humanistic understanding for the appropriate application of science and technology. In Zhang’s Kantian and life-philosophical influenced argument, which he did not perceive to be opposed to science as such, the European Enlightenment faith that knowledge alone could transform the world for the better had fallen into crisis, an insight also developed in Husserl as discussed in Chapter 6. In particular, science and logic have lost their appropriate relationship to ethics that guides their application in practical life. Eucken and Zhang had noted thirty years earlier Zhang’s idea of the close affinities between Kongzi and Kant in The Problem of Life in China and Europe.111 Contrary to the pursuit of profit and utility, of utilitarianism and pragmatism, Confucius and Kant maintained the unity of theoretical and practical rationality through the priority of practical reason and the primary role of the ethical in structuring and orienting practical life. Zhang’s explicit argumentation for the deep affinities between Confucian and Kantian philosophy in elucidating a holistic understanding of rationality and human nature, and its significance in both theory and practice, can be traced from The Problem of Life in the early 1920s through “My Philosophical Thoughts” in the early 1950s.112 Zhang elucidates in his 1953 article how, analogously to Confucian and Buddhist philosophers, Kant emphasized both dimensions of rationality and their intrinsic interconnection. Kant had not only written the Critique of Pure Reason on the scope of purely theoretical knowledge, but he composed the Critique of Practical Reason on the foundations of morality active in practical life.113 Confucian philosophy correspondingly emphasized the cultivation of benevolence (ren ҕ) and wisdom (zhi ᱎ), and Buddhist philosophy the cultivation of wisdom (zhi) and universal compassion (bei ᚆ; Skt. karun.ā). This is why, according to Zhang, Kant remains such a significant thinker for contemporary philosophy insofar as his thought pursues the cultivation of both sides of life.114 Zhang describes next how the trajectory of his philosophical thinking began with Eucken and Bergson and led increasingly to Kant. He criticized the philosophies of Eucken and Bergson in this article for overemphasizing the stream of life and for an anti-intellectualism that ignores the flourishing modern discourses of knowledge. Zhang admits that he never found life-philosophy

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convincing and adequate in itself; he read these works alongside Kant and the Neo-Kantian philosophers, as can be verified in his early writings discussed previously, to gain a more comprehensive perspective that encompassed and integrated knowledge and practical life.115 Zhang remarks that he appreciated how Eucken and Bergson expounded the philosophy of changes and the stream of becoming, as well as the free will and freedom of action. They know change and action, he wrote, yet they do not know the constant in change and how to distinguish better and worse, correct and incorrect, actions.116 They discuss knowledge and morality, but do not consider how they are stabilizing elements of culture, ethical life, and the lifeworld.117 Zhang compares their thinking to the mountain in Chinese landscape painting; your vision is consumed by the strange mountain suddenly arising in the landscape before you while you forget the actual flat and easy mundane road you are on. Such philosophies have left behind issues of practical life addressed more adequately in Confucian and Kantian practical philosophy. Zhang notes that there are innumerable philosophical masters in the modern West, but for him only Kant deserves true appreciation.118 Kant is the philosopher of modernity for Zhang whose thinking must be actively tested and reinterpreted through later developments such as Einstein’s theoretical physics. Kant recognizes how knowledge and reason are interlinked with the human heart-mind (xin ᖗ).119 We can conclude from Zhang’s analysis that Kant could be regarded as a Confucian philosopher of sorts, insofar as his philosophy is grounded in the same phenomenon: the recognition of the fundamental unity of reason and the heart-mind, a key insight of the Confucian tradition in Zhang’s portrayal that is missing or undeveloped in Western rationalism and irrationalism. Zhang reports how he read widely in and was inspired by Kant’s philosophy, and modern Western philosophy more broadly. He concluded, nonetheless, that one can realize even in this distant cultural context that—evoking Wang Yangming’s phrase—the “world is one body” (wanwu yiti 㨀⠽ϔ储).120 Zhang blends three ideas from the Chinese philosophical tradition without mentioning their textual sources to explicate this thesis, noting how: (1) Confucius recognized in Analects 6:30 the truth that one can only establish oneself by establishing others, and establish the other by establishing oneself (ji yu li er liren, ji yu da er daren Ꮕ ℆ゟ㗠ゟҎˈᏅ℆䘨㗠䘨Ҏ); (2) the Yijing ᯧ㒣 suggests that the Way (dao) prior to taking form (xing er shang ᔶ㗠Ϟ) and the formed concrete particular things (xing er xia ᔶ㗠ϟ) are one and the same; and (3) Lu Xiangshan 䱌䈵 ቅ stated, concerning the oneness of principle and world, that there is no dao without things and there are no things shang without dao.121 Presupposing the

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Chinese philosophical concept of the harmony of field-figure and essencefunction (ti-yong 储⫼), there is an intricate network between things, each with their own essence/function in interconnection with the whole, which are all in communication with one another.122 China is the land of Confucianism according to Zhang.123 And Confucianism is a philosophy of the infinite and unrestricted communication between things; that is to say, a holistic philosophy of the rationality operative in humanity and the cosmos.

Life-philosophical and Kantian Confucianism in Zhang and Mou These intercultural and intertextual moments are multidirectional, with implications in both German and Chinese contexts. There are echoes of Zhang’s interpretive encounter and exchange with German philosophy in subsequent Chinese thinking, as well as the thought of the most important Chinese philosopher of the twentieth-century. This final section briefly explores the issues of life-philosophy and intuition in the context of Kant and Confucius in Zhang and Mou Zongsan ⠳ᅫϝ (1909–1995), arguably the most important Chinese philosopher of the twentieth-century. Mou utilized Kant and Western philosophy in formulating his own account of a modern new Confucianism that is at the same time deeply indebted to and informed by Chinese philosophical traditions from early Confucian sources and the Yijing to Chinese Buddhist and Neo-Confucian philosophical systems. The two philosophers worked together at various points and these experiences left Mou bitter toward Zhang as he repeatedly mentioned in his Autobiography at Fifty (Wushi zishu Ѩक㞾䗄, 1957).124 Mou implied that Zhang abandoned him to poverty during the desperate situation of the 1920s and then, when he finally received a position and income, compelled him to become the primary editor of the social democratic journal The National Renaissance, founded by Zhang in 1932 and edited by Mou from 1937 to 1939. Zhang and Mou were both concerned with articulating a modern democratic Confucianism.125 They collaborated again after the publication of Mou’s autobiography. A group of New-Confucian intellectuals, including Mou, Zhang, Tang Junyi ૤৯↙, and Xu Fuguan ᕤᕽ㾔, published a historic manifesto and program for a modern Confucian philosophy in 1958 in the Hong Kong journal Minzhu pinglun ⇥Џ䀩䂪 (Democratic Review) and in the journal—reborn in

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Taipei after the Chinese civil war—Zaisheng entitled: “A Manifesto for a Reappraisal of Sinology and Reconstruction of Chinese Culture” (“Wei Zhongguo Wenhua Jinggao Shijie Renshi Xuanyan” ⚎Ё೟᭛࣪ᭀਞϪ⬠Ҏ຿ᅷ㿔).126 Both thinkers shared, despite their personal differences expressed by Mou in his autobiography, an interest in and commitment to synthesizing NeoConfucian and Kantian philosophy to help confront the modern Chinese condition.127 While in the West the reception of Confucius centered on whether he could be considered a Chinese Socrates, as discussed in Chapter 1, Chinese intellectuals such as Zhang and Mou pondered whether Kant could be understood in some sense as a “German Confucius.” That is, Confucianism was a philosophy concerned with the individual self and the interiority of the subject as much as the community and ritual behavior. Zhang’s reading of Kant is indebted to life-philosophical interpretations of Kant, as the life-experiential form of intuition allows Zhang to critically respond to modern scientism and Westernization, advocating the contemporary significance of the Confucian tradition. Zhang, as seen above, increasingly turned toward emphasizing the rationality inherent in ethical life based on Kantian and Confucian moral philosophy. Mou was, however, less impressed by the European life-philosophers than the early Zhang and more fully committed to notions of intuition and life than the later rationalistic Zhang in his approaches to both Kant and the Chinese philosophical legacy. Mou developed a more systematic and detailed interpretation of Kant’s Three Critiques and the role of intuition in Kant’s thought in contrast to Zhang’s earlier attempts in the 1920s to justify intuition vis-a-vis scientific knowledge. Mou is more radical in violating Kant’s critical philosophy by identifying intellectual intuition of the “thing in itself ” with the intuition of “life in itself ” (shengming zai qi ziji ⫳ੑ೼݊㞾Ꮕ) and the Chinese intellectual tradition’s conception of intrinsic or innate moral knowing (liangzhi 㡃ⶹ) of the good.128 Mou’s engagement with the problem of intuition expresses the importance of the life-experiential and life-expressive forms of intuition in his thought. Intuition is interpreted in Sinicized life-philosophical terms that helped shape Mou’s encounter with Kant, and the ongoing confrontation between Chinese philosophy and Western modernity. Mou evaluates Zhang negatively as a person and philosopher in his discussion of their relationship and collaboration in his Autobiography at Fifty. Mou’s description of his intellectual journey and concern with the problem of intuition expresses the practical importance of the life-experiential and life-expressive forms of intuition. That is to say, the problem of intuition is interpreted in a life-

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philosophical discursive language that helped shape the East Asian encounter with Kant’s critical philosophy and the modern Chinese understanding of Confucian ethics in Zhang and Mou as a discourse of autonomous self-formation and social obligation.129 A striking difference between Chinese and Western scholars of Confucianism is the role of the language of autonomy, responsibility, and subjectivity in the former and its absence in favor of the language of roles, rituals, and virtues in the latter. An appropriate assessment of Mou’s interpretation and critique of Kantian intuition accordingly should take into consideration the confluence of lifephilosophical concerns and interpretive strategies that mediated the encounters between Zhang and Mou with Kant, and New Confucian Chinese thought with elements of Western modernity.

Postscript The question might continue to linger: Why Eucken, Driesch, and China? And what became of the place they occupied in the Chinese intellectual scene of the 1920s since their names appear to be forgotten? There is a hint of an answer in a remark of Theodor W. Adorno in Minima Moralia. Adorno notes how Marx— we should add the Chinese adaptation and appropriation of Marxism and Soviet communism—had occupied the vacant places of Driesch and Rickert (i.e., of German Idealist thought) in the Far East (and Eucken could well be added to this group): It can happen easily enough that in the Far East Marx takes the place vacated by Driesch and Rickert. At times it is to be feared that the interrelationship of the non-Occidental peoples in the antagonisms of industrial society, in itself long overdue, will primarily benefit the rational increase of production and transport and the modest raising of living standards, rather than those to be emancipated. Instead of expecting miracles from pre-capitalist peoples, the mature capitalist ones ought to be on their guard against their own sobriety, their slipshod affirmation of what is traditional, and the successes of the West.130

3

Resentment and Ressentiment: Nietzsche, Scheler, and Confucian Ethics

Introduction The current chapter explores a broader historical-philosophical context, extending beyond early twentieth-century German philosophy, in order to address issues of the ethical and social significance of resentment and the “negative emotions” in relation to the Western reception—particularly in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Scheler—of “Confucian China” as a “land of resentment” and in order to consider the contemporary import of early Confucian moral psychology. First-person social experiences of resentment, shame, and “losing face” have—in contrast to Confucian ethical discourses— not been a primary concern of Western moral reflection which, as Nietzsche noted, inclines toward stressing issues concerning conscience, guilt, and responsibility.1 There is little Western thinking about shame and losing face that occurs outside of its encounter with East Asian culture and thought. Notable exceptions to this tendency with regard to resentment—a significant issue in early Confucian ethics as seen in this chapter—are three modern thinkers who interrogated resentment as a key dimension of ethical life: the philosophers P. F. Strawson, Scheler, and Nietzsche. Due to their concern with negative reactive affects and the social dynamics constitutive of resentment, they provide an expedient starting point for considering the status of resentment in the modern understanding of Confucian China as a “culture of resentment” and in early Confucian ethical reflection. This chapter pursues a reverse historical order from recent to previous Western thinkers of resentment and then proceeds to early Confucian philosophy in order to elucidate how Confucian ethics offers a unique alternative assessment of resentment and its role in socially oriented self-cultivation, the relationships between self and other, and the flourishing of ethical life. Confucian ethical

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discourses have significant argumentative and interpretive strategies with implications for contemporary ethical reflection and interpretation in ways that Western philosophy has systematically failed and generally continues to fail to recognize and appreciate.

Part One: Resentment and Ressentiment Strawson on freedom and resentment The British philosopher P. F. Strawson maintained in his classic essay “Freedom and Resentment” that resentment and other reactive affects are natural and original elements of the interpersonally constituted fabric of moral life: “the reactive feelings and attitudes … belong to involvement or participation with others in interpersonal human relationships.”2 Without affective reciprocal relations that matter to both parties, in which they are both invested and thus can potentially evoke negative reactive feelings in the self against the other, we would not be in the realm of the normal attribution of agency and responsibility. We usually do not resent what is considered to be outside of the other’s efficacy. Despite this limitation on what can be appropriately ascribed to others, in conspiracy theories and pathological emotional conditions, we resentfully feel we have been treated unfairly even though the perceived injustice was outside of anyone’s actual power and freedom to choose. Strawson depicts how resentment is a normal reaction to the other’s unfairness and indifference. Resentment is experienced as a demand that the self places upon the other, demanding her or his recognition or goodwill, whereas shame is experienced as the demand of the other placed on the self.3 The example of resentment serves to establish how the first-person participant perspective of ordinary moral life relies on internal motivations and justifications irreducible to a neutral third-person standpoint. The complexly mediated psycho-social phenomenon of resentment proves the necessitarian account of moral agency to be inadequate while simultaneously exposing the inanity of the “obscure and panicky metaphysics of libertarianism.”4 An objective third-person standpoint brackets the participant perspective that encompasses resentment and gratitude, condemnation, and forgiveness. This neutral impersonal attitude, associated with the overly theoretical viewpoint of determinism, would not include the negative and positive emotions that help constitute the fabric of ordinary moral life. It would also not encompass the space

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of reasons that includes the consideration of what is rational and reasonable to do through arguing, quarreling, and reasoning with others. In the objective attitude, which for Strawson is a useful resource to contextually adopt as a temporary stance depending on the situation, one does not reason with others insofar as they are others. Others are not participants from this intellectualized viewpoint; Strawson describes how they become the objectivized and depersonalized objects of social policy, management, training, assessment, and treatment.5 This claim indicates that resentment is as much a social-political issue as it is a moral psychological one.

Scheler’s conception of resentment Strawson did not examine in his 1962 essay questions of whether resentment is actually an elemental truth of human life, whether it is indeed normal or pathological, and whether and how resentment should be confronted within the interpersonal first- and second-person perspective of agents. These issues concerning the psycho-social bio-politics of resentment troubled earlier philosophical discourses. To take a step back in time, the German phenomenologist Max Scheler—who had written his doctoral dissertation and Habilitationsschrift with Eucken in Jena—contended in the early twentiethcentury that resentment is a fundamental concern of factical ethical life that at the same time ought not to be construed as a fundamental dimension of genuine ethical life. Scheler rejected Kantian ethical formalism for the sake of a material and content-centered value-ethics, grounded in an anti-naturalistic philosophical anthropology and notion of a material a priori. Scheler modified a typical Neo-Kantian argumentative strategy in opposition to the hermeneutical lifephilosophical emphasis on the immanent self-articulation and interpretation of life unfolded in the writings of Wilhelm Dilthey and Friedrich Nietzsche. Scheler concludes that facticity threatens and overthrows (Umsturz) the ideal values with which it should be contrasted and contested. In Ressentiment in the Formation of Morals (Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen, 1912), Scheler portrayed ressentiment as a pathological state of resentment, the potentiality for which varies according to the level of socialpolitical equality and the stability of classes in society. In genuinely egalitarian societies or in stable class societies, i.e., in any society where persons accept their roles and places, there are fewer opportunities for pathologically resenting

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others in heightened states of envy, jealousy, vengefulness, and spitefulness. Scheler contended against Nietzsche that ressentiment should not be linked with Christianity, but with its negation and the negation of the spiritual in modern bourgeois societies. Such societies are characterized by both a relative—yet still deficient—equality and the relentless competition to be better than others and the insecure desire to feel superior to one’s neighbors. Notwithstanding the limited qualified sources of ressentiment, Scheler stressed the potential for broader epidemics: Through its very origin, ressentiment is therefore chiefly confined to those who serve and are dominated at the moment, who fruitlessly resent the sting of authority. When it occurs elsewhere, it is either due to psychological contagion— and the spiritual venom of ressentiment is extremely contagious—or to the violent suppression of an impulse which subsequently revolts by “embittering” and “poisoning” the personality.6

Such a pathological psycho-social condition, which involves the fateful selfpoisoning of the wounded mind, defies the basic moral character of humanity. Scheler reverses Nietzsche’s conclusion in the Genealogy of Morals. Contrasting ressentiment and the genuinely moral order in contrast to Nietzsche’s genealogical identification of the two, Scheler remarked: “Ressentiment helps to subvert this eternal order in [human] consciousness, to falsify its recognition, and to deflect its actualization.”7 In Scheler’s portrayal, accordingly, the facticity of ressentiment is the exception, and the ideal exhibited in solidarity, love, and mutual sympathy is normative. Evoking Kierkegaard’s diagnosis of ordinary life as a spiritual sickness that calls for a transformative awakening to its absolute source in Sickness unto Death, Scheler concludes that it is the lack of the ultimate motive and object of action (that is, the divine) that generates the potential for radical ressentiment. Scheler rejects replacing concrete interpersonal relational words such as care, love, and sympathy with a theory of “altruism”—with its personally indifferent ideals of an impersonal and neutral “doing good” (Wohltun) and “goodwill” (Wohlwollen)—which is in fact an idealized distancing from the relational dynamics of self and other. Scheler only partially agreed with Nietzsche’s universal doubts about altruistic ethics, limiting their sweeping scope to artificial and hypocritical altruism in contrast to genuine concrete acts and forms of love, and eventually reversing them for the sake of a renewed philosophy of spirit informed by his conception of love, mutuality, and sympathy. Nietzsche’s critique applies to the pathological rather than the genuine forms of ethical life in Scheler’s

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reassessment. It is the “exaggeration of the value of benevolence which proceeds from ressentiment” rather than benevolence as such.8 Benevolence and sympathy express humanity in contrast to the false university of self-sacrificial altruism born of revenge and that seeks power and superiority over others through the image of moral purity. Such non-self-negating benevolence can, he remarked in The Nature of Sympathy, “be found in the humanitas of earlier antiquity, Stoic and Epicurean schools … in the intellectual history of the Chinese, with the spread of [Laozi’s] teaching from South China and its amalgamation with Buddhism; and once again in the modern sentimentally-based democracies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”9 Scheler rediscovers humanistic benevolence, which encompasses both self- and other love, in the Daoist ethos, which he linked with a freer and more open Southern Chinese culture, but not in the moralistic Confucianism that he associated with a more restrictive, repressive, and puritanical historically dominant Northern culture. Scheler emphasizes the role of “benevolence,” interpreted as a sympathetic compassion for others that maintains a healthy sense of the self, in Daoism and Buddhism; the priority of benevolence (ren ҕ) in Confucian discourses is interpreted in contrast as an ascetic, disciplinary, and self-negating altruism. The classification of distinctive Northern and Southern Chinese cultures stems from Chinese discourses and is assumed in multiple early twentieth-century German interpretations of China including those of Weber, Eucken, and Zhang discussed in Chapters 1 and 2.

Nietzsche and the constitutive force of ressentiment Scheler’s analysis of ressentiment was formulated as a rejoinder to Nietzsche’s earlier diagnosis of resentment as a social-historically instituted yet basic element of morally organized ethical life. In Nietzsche’s genealogy of the formation of morals and moral systems, the overcoming of resentment, revenge, and the ostensibly negative emotional states taught in religion and morality is not identified with the realization of a superior spiritual condition in relation to the eternal order. The notion that one has overcome resentment, as Nietzsche recurrently portrayed the altruistic doctrines of universal Christian love and socialist solidarity, is depicted as the fulfillment and primary form of destructive ressentiment. Christian ressentiment runs so deep in Western civilization that it shapes the anti-Christian resentment of Western modernity; as evident in Nietzsche’s depiction of the “English psychologists” who remain all too Christian in their enmity and rancor against Christianity.10

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Nietzsche’s conceptualization of ressentiment is more encompassing than a deficiency of sympathy for the other and the psychologically morbid departure from the eternal portrayed by Scheler. Ressentiment is realized in the nonrecognition of resentment; in not recognizing oneself as resentful and in perceiving others as motivated by a resentment that is not understood as informing one’s own attitudes and actions. The first-person perspective stressed by Strawson and the hermeneutics of trust do not adequately confront the problems and pathologies of self-deception that are crucial to the hermeneutics of distrust at work in Nietzsche’s genealogical suspicions. While resentment has a particular resented object and a specific content and reference, ressentiment is a condition that has been detached from particular experiences of resentment and definite resented persons, groups, or objects. Paradoxically, at first sight at least, Nietzsche argues that ressentiment is characteristic of individuals and groups who claim they have overcome ordinary resentments. The simmering reactive psychophysical condition of ressentiment, according to Nietzsche’s analysis, belongs to natures that lack the capacity to react and respond with ordinary active and reactive affects. The negative affects have become complex, cunning, and subterranean; ressentiment is accordingly not the same as ordinary resentment. Scholars of Nietzsche can obscure the relation between the two when they overemphasize their distinction, as ressentiment is linked with resentment; it is a transformation of ordinary feelings of resentment into a complex emotionalcognitive state. Nor is ressentiment the same as revenge, which for both Nietzsche and the early twentieth-century Nietzsche-influenced Chinese author Lu Xun 元䖙 (1881–1936) can be an expression of nobility.11 Ressentiment is a general state of vengefulness against this world and life itself in Nietzsche’s portrayal. Nietzsche accordingly describes in the Genealogy how the “slave revolt in morality” reverses the high and low and aims at the negation of the other rather than the affirmation of the self. This revolt against the nobility and loftiness of character originates in the incapacity of real revenge: the ressentiment of natures that are denied the true reaction, that of deeds, and compensate themselves with an imaginary revenge. While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says No to what is “outside,” what is “different,” what is “not itself ”; and this No is its creative deed.12

The cultivation of an imaginary otherworldly revenge in due course culminates in real violence against others and the destruction and annihilation of alterity in Nietzsche’s analysis.

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To interpret Nietzsche’s argumentation in response to Scheler’s objection, ressentiment remains operative in the consciousness of the eternal that does not recognize how it thinks and acts out of ordinary, all too human motivations. These motives, as Nietzsche shows in the Genealogy of Morals, are inevitably temporal and transient. Human motives are generated and determined by biological, historical, and social forces and only secondarily formed by individual decision, rational agency, and ideal value. Nietzsche diagnosed the ressentiment constitutive of conventional religion, morality, and the politics of equality in the Genealogy of Morals. The logic of reciprocal recognition, equal exchange, and sacrifice of the one for the many requires and cultivates a reactive fear and envy of the other who must be tamed, disciplined, and brought under control or rejected, excluded, and eliminated as a hostile foreign power. The ressentiment of vengeful priests, their secularized heirs, and the manipulated masses constitutes the motivational basis for forms of domination. Nietzsche contrasted this reactive yet cunning and skillful ressentiment with the lordly affirmation of the self in the immanence of its own desires and vitality of life. Nietzsche’s ethics of self-affirmation is asymmetrical in prioritizing the self of the other even as it undermines the reactive and calculative treatment of others. Noble self-affirmation affirms the self in its fullness without negating the other. It affirms the other in an asymmetrical and non-calculative generosity and bounty born of its own excess and overflowing sense of self that Nietzsche likens in Thus Spoke Zarathustra to the bounteousness of natural phenomena such as the sun and water, which give without needing to receive from others. Because of the asymmetry between self and other, Nietzsche has been critiqued as a radically anti-egalitarian and hierarchical thinker by proponents of standard conceptions of socio-political equality, for instance, Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth, and praised as a postmodern thinker of an alterity and difference resisting the relentless logic of identity and enmity.13 In this context, it is sensible to question whether Nietzsche’s historical analysis presupposes an objectivizing stance that misses the internal or immanent character of interpersonal relations, as described by Strawson, and whether it overthrows the reciprocity and mutuality of self and other required by Scheler’s ethical vision.

The resentment of Confucian China There has been a tendency in its Western reception to interpret Chinese culture and thought through the social-psychological lens of resentment. Nietzsche’s

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argument that moralism and religiosity are the higher achievements of resentment informed his infrequent discussions of Confucius and Chinese culture. In the passage on the “improvers of humanity” in the Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche interprets Confucius as a law-giver like other law-givers such as Manu, Plato, and the founders of the three monotheistic faiths. Confucius is presented in this context as yet another instance of the immoral moralist. He becomes a symbol of a priestly form of power who never doubted his right to tell “golden lies” in order to regulate the masses and bring them to conformity through breeding and taming techniques: Neither Manu nor Plato nor Confucius nor the Jewish and Christian teachers have ever doubted their right to lie. They have not doubted that they had very different rights too. Expressed in a formula, one might say: all the means by which one has so far attempted to make [humanity] moral were through and through immoral.14

Confucius is furthermore compared to the founders of political empires in an unpublished note from 1885. Nietzsche insists that “great artists of government” (Regierungskünstler) and power from Confucius to Napoleon—and we might recall here the discussion in Chapter 1 of Popper-Lynkeus’s affirmative comparison of Confucius with Alexander the Great and Napoleon—use noble lies and moralistic deception to pacify the masses through physiological-spiritual programs of “spiritual enlightenment”: Spiritual enlightenment is an infallible means for making humans unsure, weaker in will, so they are more in need of company and support—in short, for developing the herd animal in humans. Therefore all great artists of government so far (Confucius in China, the imperium Romanum, Napoleon, the papacy at the time when it took an interest in power and not merely in the world), in the places where the dominant instincts have culminated so far, also employed spiritual enlightenment—at least let it have its way (like the popes of the Renaissance). The self-deception of the masses concerning this point, e.g., in every democracy, is extremely valuable: making humans smaller and more governable is desired as “progress”!15

Nietzsche interpreted China, which he described as “a country where largescale discontentment and the capacity for change became extinct centuries ago,” through the prism of the Oriental despotism thesis, developed by earlier German philosophers discussed in Chapter 1, as a construction of enlightened power that destroys all that is individual and unique in reducing life to a banal equality and happiness.16

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As in Strawson’s far less dramatic argument about the role of resentment in normal interpersonal life, Nietzsche concluded that the apparent absence of resentment is in fact more problematic than its active or reactive presence. However, Nietzsche goes further than Strawson to the extent that the objective stance is not a justifiable—if temporary—departure from the participant perspective. It is a self-deceptive illusion of not being a participant and lacking a perspective. Such a condition is the product of a history of discipline and training and the bundling and redoubling of ordinary resentments into a pathological state of being. Further, altruistic attitudes are genealogically interpreted as dispositions that are deeply motivated by ressentiment. In this setting, Nietzsche constructs and construes “Confucius” and “China” as warnings to modern Europe about the last fruits of resentment, that is to say, of a condition where resentment and the reactive affects reign while appearing to have been tamed and trained. The spiritual and enlightened conquest of these affects has not led to their genuine overcoming. They are intensified and more poisonous in becoming the invisible—and hence all the more powerful—motives operating behind the face of tranquility, equanimity, and altruism. Playing with the Chinese expression xiaoxin ᇣᖗ (“be careful”; taken too literally, “small heart”), Nietzsche depicted “late civilizations”—such as that of the modern European who could only be perceived as distasteful and dwarfish by an ancient Greek—affecting a “smallness of heart.”17 Nietzsche maintained that the altruistic goodness and spiritual awakening promoted by Confucius and the Buddha had reduced the Chinese to passivity and an abject equality under an all-powerful despot, arguing that Europe currently faced a similar fate from its forces of political and spiritual enlightenment that “might easily establish Chinese conditions and a Chinese ‘happiness.’”18 The ascetic self-denial and selfsacrifice distinctive of altruistic ethics is said in Ecce Homo to “deprive existence of its great character and would castrate men and reduce them to the level of desiccated Chinese stagnation.”19 China and the Chinese are marginal to Nietzsche’s concerns for the most part. He characteristically employs Indian and Buddhist non-Western examples in his writings. The Chinese move closer to the center—if not directly into the center itself—of Nietzsche’s geopolitics, which is focused on the ChristianJewish world, when he branded the Chinese, German, and Jewish peoples as three examples of “priestly peoples” in the Genealogy of Morals: “By contrast [with the Romans], the Jews were a priestly nation of ressentiment par excellence, possessing an unparalleled genius for popular morality: compare peoples with

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similar talents, such as the Chinese or the Germans, with the Jews, and you will realize who are first rate and who are fifth.”20 In the context of his polemic against “decadence” characterized by ressentiment, and despite their difference in ability and rank, Nietzsche described these three peoples as “peoples with similar talents.” Here Nietzsche is again describing a generalized priestly character or type. They are three different exemplars of “priestly nations” dominated by the forces and pathologies of ressentiment. In his discussions of China, however, Nietzsche continues to use the language of ahistorical stasis and an ethnocentrically defined “Oriental” despotism developed by earlier German thinkers such as Herder, Meiners, and Hegel. Granting the questionable cogency of Nietzsche’s assessment of Confucius, there are reasons to appreciate the ambivalence at work in Nietzsche’s dialectic of power and resentment. Nietzsche is frequently depicted as a thinker of power and even at times—although this is conspicuously incorrect—an apologetic defender of established existing powers. Nietzsche exposes existing power in his genealogical deconstruction to be constituted and its constitution to consist of deception, illusion, and—in many cases— revenge and resentment. The masses, whose bodies have been shaped by discipline and whose minds have been manipulated by their own fears and feelings of resentment, become passive instruments of this formation and projection of power. Ressentiment appears as a complex point of mediation in the lifeworld (Lebenswelt) or—to adopt a Hegelian language—ethical life (Sittlichkeit), as it simultaneously constitutes both power and weakness. Resentments are nurtured through experiences of impotence and inability and becoming overpowering in the condition of ressentiment even when it has assumed power. It is consequently a misreading to conclude that all power is good and noble in Nietzsche. On the contrary, power is typically structured by, and functions as an expression of, ressentiment. This system of power poisons the self who is unable to freely and generously use it, as it takes on pathological forms oppressive to the poisoned self as well as to others. Nietzsche repeatedly confronts this type of power that he stylizes as priestly power.21 It is born of real suffering and trauma and poisons the wound and encourages it to fester in order to survive the trauma. Nevertheless, despite becoming manifest in only a few rare historical moments, Nietzsche held on to the hope that freedom and nobility can be accomplished in the genuine exercise of power. The genuine feeling of power in the self is contrasted with the myths and idols of the negation of power that signify its hidden seductive and pathological exercise.

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Part Two: Early Confucian Ethics and Resentment Resentment, recognition, and the lifeworld One of the basic issues of the ethical lifeworld appears to be the complex feeling of resentment. It has two dimensions: (1) the lack of acknowledgment and recognition from others and (2) how to cope with feelings of resentment in oneself and others. Scheler emphasizes transcending these feelings of resentment through positive relational feelings of empathy and sympathy, affects that interconnect the person in love and sympathy with others and with the unity of spirit that intrinsically has a personal and interpersonal instead of a purely natural—whether the order of nature is conceived mechanistically or vitalistically as in Driesch—structure.22 The Chinese, as other peoples, have their own particular way of understanding spirit and the divine for Scheler: they depersonalize its intrinsically personal structure by interpreting it as an impersonal order instead of as the free self-disclosure between persons.23 Nietzsche, in contrast to Scheler’s emphasis on spirit, identifies this spiritual labor of emotional transformation as part of the problem of a more poisonous and deeply entrenched structure of resentment that he designates with the French word ressentiment. The emotional complex designated by ressentiment is a structural (de-)formation of character to be distinguished from ordinary transient feelings of resentment. Nietzsche’s diagnosis of ressentiment could be potentially applied to the Analects (Lunyu 䂪䁲), a diverse fragmentary compilation representing divergent interpretative tendencies attributed to Kongzi (ᄨᄤ) himself, as Lu Xun advocated in the spirit of Nietzsche. Lu associated the everyday practice of Confucian values to cannibalism in a literal and metaphorical manner in “A Madman’s Diary” (Kuangren Riji ⢖Ҏ᮹㿬), one of his prominent short stories and—similarly to “The True Story of Ah Q” (A Q Zhengzhuan 䰓Qℷ‫—)ڇ‬a story of a culture dominated by ressentiment.24 Lu’s depiction of the gentry class in the stories echoes and further caricaturized the earlier literary image of the suanru 䝌‫( ۦ‬literally, “sour” Confucian), who is perceived as increasingly bookish, dogmatic, resentful, and evermore tainted and embittered by worldly experiences. Nietzsche and Lu are historically correct that a specific understanding and institutionalization of Confucian morality can result in weakened and pathological conditions of resentful passivity in which the self is burdened by all the cares and obligations of paternal, familial, and communal expectations.

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The story of Confucian and consequently Chinese ressentiment articulated by Nietzsche and Lu is complicated by turning to the Confucian classics. Significant passages in the Analects and other early ru ‫( ۦ‬Confucian) works indicate ethical-psychological strategies for countering resentment and other reactive feelings as part of cultivating oneself as an ethical person.

Interpersonal resentment and recognition in the Analects The remaining sections of this chapter embody an endeavor to interpret the role of negative emotions in early ruist ethics through the example of the complex feeling of resentment and related affects as articulated in the Analects, attributed to Confucius, and related classical Chinese sources. It is argued that the early Confucian model of ethical cultivation (xiu ׂ or xiushen ׂ䑿) is unfolded in the context of (1) unraveling reactive and negative feelings against others as they operate in oneself and in others and (2) promoting concrete relationships of reciprocal and mutual yet graded and asymmetrical recognition between oneself and others. Early Confucian ethics can be portrayed for these reasons as a form of the ethics of asymmetry and alterity, albeit with striking differences from contemporary Western understandings of difference and identity. In contrast to modern Western discourses of recognition and resentment, both the pervasiveness of negative affects such as resentment under certain social-political conditions and the ethical demand to counteract and transform reactive feelings within the self as well as in others are emphasized. Examples of negative emotions include various forms of envy, hatred, jealousy, vengefulness, and in particular resentment. Negative feelings about being inadequately recognized and acknowledged often appear justifiable, on generalized grounds of fairness, but are in reality psychologically and socially corrosive. Disentangling reactive feelings like resentment in oneself and in others is accordingly identified in a number of key passages in the Analects as a primary element of becoming a genuinely noble or ethically exemplary person (junzi ৯ ᄤ). To comport oneself with humility without obsequiousness and generosity without grandiosity toward others is to seek to be worthy of ethical recognition even when recognition, acknowledgment, and commendation are not and might never be forthcoming. The petty or ignoble person (xiaoren ᇣҎ) in contrast is depicted as fixated on his or her own limited and self-interested concerns to the detriment of others’ well-being and as governed by reactive feelings against others such as the resentment of feeling unrecognized and slighted.

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Standard forms of modern Western ethical theory typically presuppose that equal and symmetrical relations are the foremost means of unraveling reactive emotions, insofar as they include reflection on the moral psychology of negative emotions at all. In addition to examining various forms of resentment, vengefulness, ill-will, hatred, envy, contempt, bitterness, and anger at work within oneself, Confucian ethics entails considering the negative emotions that one’s own behavior can cause in others. It is claimed that this thesis is due to the asymmetrical acknowledgment of the other person as non-identical with oneself. The recognition of the other is in this case not of an absolute individual or essential self who stands independently outside of and above its relations. Recognition is constitutively relational and social while not being necessarily symmetrical. Such recognition of the other is a necessary condition for disentangling the emotional nexus of resentment that is realized through relational role ethical appropriateness and self-investigation and cultivation. The other person has virtues, qualities, positions, possessions, abilities that I might never have and will not have to the same degree. The contextual relationality operative between self and other does not signify the identity between self and other. The asymmetrical reciprocity thesis defended at this juncture entails that one ethically recognizes and is responsive to others regardless of how one is recognized or unrecognized by others. This asymmetrical demand that one places on oneself with respect to others extends from close familial to general social relationships.25 Early Confucian ethics as a result integrates a nuanced and realistic moral psychology of negative socially shaped emotions such as resentment and antagonism with a normatively orienting model of self-cultivation that is indispensable for countering negative emotions and practicing humane benevolence (ren) toward others. Instead of articulating an altruistic or egoistic vision of the ethical, the meditation of the priority of others and self-interest in ethically cultivating oneself is stressed. The ethically and ritually cultivated condition of the junzi suggested in the Analects is oriented toward others to the point of asymmetrically prioritizing the other, and the other’s well-being, over oneself while at the same time being practicable in the resolute examination of and care for the self.

Resentment and the struggle for recognition An elementary everyday concern is being sufficiently or appropriately recognized and appreciated by other persons. One basic feature of ethical life thus appears

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to be—to use Hegel’s expression—the “struggle for recognition” and the potential resentment generated by the perceived lack of recognition and how to cope with its absence or denial. The disappointment and frustration of not being recognized and acknowledged by others strikes many as a natural response. Even as such feelings are to be expected, and can be appropriate in the face of social injustices, emotional reactiveness and negativity represents an ethical, psychological, and social problem. In this context, one can pose questions such as: Do such feelings naturally lead to justifiable negative reactions, and their associated reactive emotions, which are to be accepted as part of social life? Or do negative affects become debilitating to one’s own moral life as well as to the well-being of others? Such questions are pressing issues today, as individuals who feel unrecognized, unappreciated, and unfairly slighted take their revenge on the communities they feel has slighted them through violence or through the subtler means that concerned Nietzsche in his historical diagnosis of ressentiment in the Genealogy of Morals. Ressentiment is, accordingly as argued earlier, the pathological form of resentment that governs conventional morality and religion. Issues of recognition and resentment have been central in modern and contemporary European philosophy and social theory. There is good reason here to take up the question of the dialectic of recognition and misrecognition in order to examine (1) if and to what extent recognition and resentment play a significant role in classical Confucian philosophy and (2) whether a reconstruction of early Confucian ethics with respect to this dialectic of recognition and misrecognition can offer an alternative critical model of conceptualizing this grammar of social and psychological conflict and diagnosing the present.

The dialectic of recognition and resentment in the Analects At first glance, thinking about recognition and resentment in the context of early Confucian sources might appear as an alien imposition. However, bringing an alternative question to bear on a text can bring about new insights and noteworthy passages in the Analects point to the necessity of countering various reactive feelings in the context of not being adequately recognized and acknowledged by others. From the beginning of the text in Analects 1:1, being ethically noble is explicitly linked with not being yun ᜡ. Yun has been translated in various English editions of the Analects as indignation, feeling hurt or bothered, and

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as being resentful. The negative feeling of yun is (1) socially mediated and (2) reactive toward others, since it is linked to others “not knowing” or—in the interpretation developed in this essay—“not recognizing” (buzhi ϡⶹ) one: ᅌ 㗠ᰖ㖦ПˈϡѺ䁾Т˛᳝᳟㞾䘴ᮍ՚ˈϡѺῖТ˛Ҏϡⶹ㗠ϡᜡˈ ϡѺ৯ᄤТ˛ To learn something and practice it; is this not a pleasure? To have friends come from afar; is this not a delight? Not to be resentful (yun ᜡ) at other’s failure to recognize (buzhi ϡⶹ) one, is this not to be ethically noble (junzi ৯ᄤ)?26

In Analects 1:1, being noble, or ethically exemplary, is explicitly linked with not being yun ᜡ, which has been translated as indignant, feeling hurt, to be bothered, and resentful. This feeling of resentment is linked to buzhi ϡⶹ, which means that the other does not “know” one, implying the other’s lack or denial of recognition and appreciation. The conception that ethical nobility calling for a particular kind of response to the absence or privation of something from others, which is meaningful for oneself, without reactively worrying about it is similarly evident in Analects 1:16: ϡᙷҎПϡᏅⶹˈᙷϡⶹҎгDŽ I do not worry (huan ᙷ) about not being recognized. I worry about not recognizing (buzhi ϡⶹ) others.27

Huan is rightfully not typically translated as resentment. Huan signifies to suffer from (illness, misfortune, and disease), to be troubled by, or—as possible in its first occurrence in this passage—a reactive emotion akin to resentment. Non-recognition is here the occasion for another type of reactive emotional condition, namely worrying. Huan indicates an inappropriate reactive being worried in its first use and an appropriate ethically oriented being worried in its second use in 1: 16. Additional support for this interpretation is evident in another one of the canonical Four Books (Sishu ಯ᳌). Mengzi ᄳᄤ differentiated having inappropriate anxieties about not being recognized, thereby becoming psychologically and ethically perturbed, and the ethically noble person’s moral concern for cultivating benevolence and propriety, which constitutes a task of a lifetime.28 In Mencius 4B28: 7, for instance, huan ᙷ functions as a form of anxiousness that is contrasted with you ᝖. You has an overlapping but divergent range of meanings: anxiety, concern, worry, being bereft, and sorrow. The pursuit of becoming ethically noble in relation to others is a challenging responsibility that is to be pursued without anxieties or reactive negative emotions. Benevolence (ren) is a task; that is, as Zengzi ᳒ᄤ specified in the Analects, the ethical vocation

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is a heavy burden that ends only with death.29 Providing evidence once again for the significance of the task of undoing negative affects in the Analects, the ethically exemplary figure of Confucius is portrayed as warning against resenting either heaven or other persons in Analects 14:35: “I do not resent (yuan) heaven and do not fault (you ᇸ) others” (bu yuantian, bu youren ϡᗼ໽ˈϡᇸҎ). What then is the trouble with negative and reactive emotions? Aren’t they evolutionary adaptations? Might they not be salutary as in the examples of just indignation and divine wrath of the Biblical tradition? The sense of justice and ethical judgment of what is good and bad are also central parts of Confucian ethical psychology. But reactive feelings against heaven and others are perceived as anxiety provoking afflictions formed and mediated in social processes of misrecognition or the perceived lack of recognition by others. If it can be compared to recent debates over the ethics of recognition, early Confucian ethics approximates more closely an ethics of recognition than an ethics of distribution, since distributive justice (that is, of who appropriately receives what) follows the dialectic of interpersonal recognition.30 Early Confucian sources reveal an asymmetrical relational strategy for dismantling the complex emotional compounds of resentment by minimizing what one expects from others while at the same time intensifying what one expects from oneself. In this sense, I am more responsible than the other. Rather than focusing on what others ostensibly owe me, and the slights I might have received from this recognition and regard not being given to me, I am asked to turn my attention to whether and how I am recognizing and regarding others.

Resentment and asymmetrical ethics This point of asymmetrically prioritizing the other over the self, even when there is no expectation of reciprocation involved, is evident in the attitude one should take toward one’s parents. For instance, it is stated in Analects 4:18 concerning asymmetrical filial respect toward parents: џ⠊↡ᑒ䂿DŽ㽟ᖫϡᕲˈজᭀϡ䘩ˈࢲ㗠ϡᗼDŽ In serving your mother and father, one remonstrates gently. If one sees that they are not going to listen, one continues to be respectful and does not distance oneself from them. Even if it is burdensome, one does not feel resentful (yuan ᗼ).

The asymmetrical priority of the other over the self is most palpable in familial relations in Confucianism. It might be objected that this priority is merely hierarchical or that it is self-interested in the long run: one might eventually

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be a parent oneself and in turn reap the benefits of such a familial system. Family relations are the matrix in which all ethical relations are nourished and developed, and the asymmetrical concern for others extends beyond one’s parents and family in passages such as Analects 1:16 and 12:2.31 One justification for this asymmetry between self and other is the distinction made in Analects 4:16 between that which is “righteous” or ethically appropriate and fitting (yi 㕽) and that which concerns personal advantage and profit (li ߽). The distinction between the fitting and the profitable forms the basis of the difference between the exemplary ethically noble person and the petty unethical person. While ethical righteousness impartially respects all while responding to the partial situated particularity of each concrete person, the partial calculative advantage of the ignoble person disregards what is impartially appropriate for others in his or her self-interested concern.32 Furthermore, a distinction should be made between the degree of asymmetrical regard for others shown by the benevolent person and by the sage (shengren 㘪Ҏ). In Analects 6:30, in response to Zigong’s ᄤ䉶 question concerning perfect benevolence, the benevolent person is described as establishing and promoting the self through establishing and promoting others. Similarly, the ethically noble person is described as cultivating the self through respect and reverence for others in Analects 14:42 (xiu ji yi jing ׂᏅҹᭀ). But, in the ensuing conversation about the sage, even the great Yao ฃ and Shun 㟰 are said to find it challenging to cultivate themselves by realizing a condition of tranquility to all. This claim indicates that there can potentially be a higher ethical condition in which the sage acts for others beyond benevolence. This sage is portrayed in the Analects as acting solely out of generosity and kindness toward others without consideration of establishing the self or symmetrically receiving something in return.33 Confucian asymmetry is consequently not typically a pure self-sacrifice or self-negation, as Nietzsche and Scheler contended, nor is it the asymmetry of the self and the absolute other or God familiar in Western religiously informed ethics. Asymmetry is regarded in early Confucian sources as the extension and broadening of the self in the context of its ethical self-concern and selfcultivation. The give and take, the rituals and spontaneous moments, of the everyday lifeworld is not motivated by pure selflessness and pure otherness. The vitality and motivation of moral life arise from the self being concerned for itself and its ethical character in its relations with and concern for others. It is not by negating ordinary desires and feelings that the ethical is to be realized. It is in effect ordinary non-heroic and mundane motives that shape and encourage

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becoming a self that is understood as a situated responsive participant in the practices and patterns of the everyday life of the family and community. As Scheler, Strawson, and the early Confucians each comprehend in different ways, it is in effect these ordinary non-heroic and mundane motives that shape and encourage becoming an ethical self conceived of as a responsible participant in the everyday life of the family and community. While Strawson articulated the role of reactive feelings in the first-person participant perspective that he argues are necessary to moral life, early Confucian discourses emphasize transforming reactive affects within the participant perspective of the ordinary immanent lifeworld without appealing to notions of a third-person neutrality, a God’s eye transcendent perspective, or a purportedly contextless objective point of view from nowhere. Anglo-American moral philosophers, such as Strawson and Bernard Williams, rejected the cognitivism of Kantian deontological and consequentialist moral theory. They argued that intellectualist moral theories require inappropriately distancing the agent from his or her emotional life. Owen Flanagan has argued in his essay “Destructive Emotions” how self-transformation through structuring one’s cognitions and affects, including transfiguring the emotions, is not only a basic characteristic of Eastern ethics but of traditions of moral wisdom.34 In Flanagan’s analysis of Buddhist moral psychology and in Confucianism, working through and eliminating negative emotions in cognitive-affective restructuring is not an alienation from unchangeable “natural” states. Receptively working with one’s emotions belongs to the dynamic of moral wisdom itself.35 A further example is a third conceptually related word associated with sentiments of resentment found in passages from the Analects concerning one’s attitude toward one’s parents as well as portrayals of the virtuous brothers Boyi ԃ་ and Shuqi ন唤.36 It is claimed in Analects 7:15 that these two brothers did not feel resentment (yuan ᗼ), since they “sought and obtained humaneness, what would they resent?” In Analects 5:23, it is said that they “did not recall old grievances, and so there was little resentment (yuan ᗼ) against them.” Yuan ᗼ in these contexts signified to resent, blame, and complain, or to inwardly feel aggrieved.37 Confucius was depicted in these sources as associating the absence of the feeling of resentment and complaint against others with the achievement of benevolence or humaneness (ren) that German philosophers interpreted through concepts of love and sympathy. This general concern is construed ethically in the distinction between gratitude and resentment in the daoshu 䘧 㸧 chapter of the “New Writings” (Xinshu ᮄ᳌), a political treatise by the early Han dynasty scholar Jia Yi 䊜䂐 (200–168 BCE) advocating the regulation of

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classes in society through the principle of benevolence: “If there is an immanent order to practicing virtue it is deserving gratitude; to reverse deserving gratitude is to cause resentment (yuan ᗼ).”38 Confucius is portrayed in Analects 15:5 as describing how lower forms of conduct that produce resentment in others can be circumvented by expecting more of oneself and less of others. The Confucian ethical concern with not producing and furthering resentment in the other is not adequately elucidated in Nietzsche’s genealogy or Scheler’s portrait of how reactive emotions have structured and deformed ethical life. Passages such as Analects 5:23 illustrate how action for the other, done out of what Scheler would have described as sympathy, is a basic strategy for reducing resentfulness against others and within oneself. Likewise, the discussion in Analects 20:2 indicates the significance of not making others feel resentful through one’s own behavior. An additional fourth less frequently used term in the literature is fen ᝸ (indignation or anger). It is likewise used in sources to emphasize not angering others and, in particular, not becoming the source of resentment and enmity in others. There are grounds to conclude based on these and related linguistic expressions that: even if others act in a way that would produce negative emotions like resentment in yourself, becoming ethically realized as a junzi entails not having reactive feelings by working on and adjusting your emotions and by acting non-symmetrically and non-interchangeably with humane benevolence toward them. This benevolence encompasses moral criticism, diagnosis, and judgment from a Confucian perspective, and the benevolence one respectively owes toward the harmful and the virtuous is differentiated in Analects 14:34. The exemplary person should not become emotionally petty or ignoble toward others regardless of how others treat him or her or their moral character.

Resentment and the ethics of alterity The strategy of an other-oriented self-interestedness, in which self and other are conceived as relationally conjoined and complementary rather than as irreconcilable contraries or as isolated individuals, introduces an alternative model to how resentment is typically conceptualized in Western ethics in terms of an either-or between the selfishness of egoism and selflessness of altruism. According to the interpretative reconstruction offered in this chapter, early Confucian ethics suggests that reducing resentment in others also reduces its being turned by others against oneself. In the image of selling resentment as

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buying disaster, the ethical is conjoined with and not divorced from pragmatic concerns as is emblematic of postmodern Western accounts of ethical asymmetry and alterity. Instead of “selling resentment,” Confucius is interpreted in the Chinese tradition based on one passage in the Analects as advocating repaying resentment with uprightness instead of virtue, since only the virtuous are to be repaid with virtue. However, another interpretive tradition attributes the idea of repaying resentment with virtue to Confucius and thereby potentially transforming calamity into good fortune.39 The reason for this is that, as F. T. Cheng (Zheng Tianxi 䜁໽䣿) argued in the 1940s, “retaliation or revenge lowers oneself to the level of the wrongdoer, and resentment shows a lack of magnanimity.”40 The ethical point of view cannot be divorced from the pragmatic conditions in which it is cultivated and realized. The social interactive process of undermining the causes of resentment in others and oneself is pragmatically associated with good fortune. Still, it accomplishes more than pragmatically decreasing the potential resentment of others against oneself. It would, in addition, undo the feverish state of one’s reactive emotions and their moral-psychological fixations in one’s heart-mind (xin ᖗ). Undoing resentment is consequently a shared social undertaking rather than the romantic vocation of the heroic, isolated, noble individual who always sacrifices himself or herself for others.

Part Three: Resentment and Intercultural Confucian Ethics A Nietzschean or a Confucian Ethos? One could offer reasons for the positive role of resentment in social life or for an equality of strength that is articulated through the affirmation of the nobility and generosity of the self. Both could be strategies for modifying Nietzsche’s genealogical critique of morality. A different strategy is suggested by the analysis of resentment developed in the Analects. Nietzsche distinguishes two different ideals of character: the reactive resentful character and the affirmative lordly one. The early ru ‫ ۦ‬or “Confucian” authors of the Analects, attributed to Kongzi, interpreted the distinction between the exemplary person (junzi ৯ᄤ) and the petty person (xiaoren ᇣҎ), the “small person” who is unable to exhibit “smallness” or humbleness of the heart-mind, in light of the negative affects. The petty or

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ignoble person is portrayed as resenting being kept at a distance and acting out of a limited moral psychological condition; that is, out of small-minded selfinterest and mean-spirited feelings of resentment toward others in an anxious and insecure self-centered and partisan search for profits, favors, comforts, and accolades. As the Great Learning (Daxue ໻ᅌ) confirms, in contrasting the path of resentment with the path of kindness and tolerance, animosity and resentment undermine the capacity to achieve a straightness of mind and wholeness of character.41 Negative emotions in the Analects are, as seen in the previous discussion above, understood through a variety of moral psychologically interrelated yet distinct terms that do not all mean to resent: yun ᜡ (to be indignant, to feel hurt or discontented by), yuan ᗼ (to blame, to complain of), fen ᝸, and huan ᙷ and you ᝖ (to suffer, be worried or troubled by). The authors of the Analects can consequently be said to be aware of the ubiquity of resentment under certain conditions and the ethical requirement to challenge it and related reactive feelings both within oneself (e.g., not being resentful) and in relation to others (e.g., not engendering resentment in others in personal life and in government). Early Confucian ethical thought identifies this moralpsychological work on the emotions as being a key element of the ethically noble character of the junzi. This is emphasized in the understanding of resentment and related reactive affects revealed in early Confucian sources. Clearly, negative affects might play a positive role and be worthy of praise such as indignation against injustice and viciousness, yet they threaten to overflow their proper degree, damaging others and the persons whose comportment and attitudes are shaped by them. Untangling resentment in oneself as well as in others is a primary element of becoming a gentleman, who as both Confucius and Mengzi are recorded as noticing does not resent heaven or humans, and genuinely noble in the ethical sense. This nobility is achieved through self-cultivation and is contrasted with the ethically flawed comportment of the petty person who is fixated on his or her own limited concerns and selfish interests. It accordingly should be part of a well-rounded account of resisting and unfixing reactive emotions against others. The recognition of the other in her or his asymmetry is necessary for unraveling the nexus of resentment. This asymmetrical recognition is visible in Analects 1:1 and 1:16. To this extent, early Confucian literati have a nuanced and realistic moral psychology of resentment as well as the ethical self-cultivation and selfrectification requisite for dismantling resentment in achieving a condition of asymmetrically gradated and appropriately enacted humane benevolence.

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The early Confucian model of self-affirmation through cognitive-affective self-rectification suggests an alternative to Scheler’s appeal to spirit and Nietzsche’s underestimation of the ethics of the other. Self-affirmation does not require the negation of the other. It leads to a cultivation of the self that involves confronting one’s own resentment. A resentful state of mind is tied up with a narrow self-concern and egoism that expresses a limited or small conception of the self as well as an exaggerated sense of one’s merits, such that one can act for others without necessitating the same in the calculative expectation and instrumental logic of exchange. The Confucian ethical point of view relies on the reciprocity (shu ᘩ) of seeing the other as being analogous to oneself. This analogousness is not, however, the equal symmetry between independent individual agents that is always in the end a conditional self-interested exchange. An ethical claim is perceived as being asymmetrically made upon oneself independent of one’s own claim upon the other and thus does not entail the symmetry that reduces the other to oneself and occasions the resentment of not being treated equally by the other. Analogy is in this setting not identity, given the importance of making distinctions in moral judgment and the asymmetries operative in interpersonal human relations. The asymmetrical and proportional character of the ethical signifies the impossibility of expecting of others the same as what one expects of oneself and of experiencing this ethical demand without resentment; that is, to expect and demand more of oneself than of others, such that the other’s lack of recognition and appreciation is not perceived as a justification of one’s own lack. Indeed, beyond this, it brings forth the asymmetrical demand that one recognize the other regardless of whether the other recognizes oneself. Even if the logic of reciprocal and equal exchange naturally flows into resentment against others, the asymmetry in the early Confucian articulation of reciprocity and mutuality (shu ᘩ)—a notion in which sympathy and kindness toward the other come to be accentuated rather than a pragmatic instrumental exchange—turns questions of resentment and responsibility back upon oneself: ϡᙷ⛵ԡˈᙷ᠔ҹゟ˗ϡᙷ㥿Ꮕⶹˈ∖⠆ৃⶹгDŽ I do not worry (huan ᙷ) about not holding a good position; I worry about how I make myself fit to gain a position. I do not worry about being unrecognized; I seek to be fit to be recognized.42

According to the interpretation developed in this chapter, the “anxiety” and “worry” expressed in Analects 4:14 encompass feelings of resentment. It can be understood to entail the need not to feel resentment at not holding a good

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position and being recognized, a common concern in ordinary ethical life, but focusing instead on becoming ethically worthy of others’ recognition: that is to say, “I do not resent being unrecognized; I seek to be worthy of recognition.”

Unfixing resentment Unfixing damaging reactive emotions is a concern that overlaps between Chinese (Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist) and Western (ancient as well as modern thinkers such as Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Scheler) philosophy as a therapeutics of the self. It is not only a psychological endeavor, it is an ethical and social-political undertaking in these different discourses. It likewise indicates a social-political task in the Analects and the Mencius that reveals the social-critical dimension of Confucian ethics, notably in the work and tradition that—as seen in Chapter 2—Zhang Junmai attributed to Mengzi. The exemplary orienting model of selfcultivation suggested in the Analects encompasses undoing reactive feelings in the self even as it calls for asymmetrically recognizing the difficulty of not having such reactive feelings under challenging life-conditions. An example of the early Confucian attention to the social conditions of negative emotions is the remark: “To be poor without resentment (yuan ᗼ) is difficult. To be rich without arrogance is easy.”43 Both the impoverished and the wealthy require the moral psychological work of self-cultivation. Nonetheless, despite the easiness and difficulty involved, the wealthy are likelier to be arrogant than the poor resentful in the Confucian understanding.44 The powerful fail to recognize and show reverence for the weak and destitute, which reveals a pettiness and lack of appropriate ethical self-cultivation and intersubjective relational appropriateness. Revealing its potential as a critical model, early Confucian sources note that the “petty person” can be a person of power and wealth who fails to act with the appropriate measure that such power or wealth bring, such as the inauthentic kings and nobles criticized in the Analects and the Mencius. While the ignoble person is ethically problematic in shifting fault and blame on others, and evading recognizing others and self-reflection, the ethically noble person (junzi) self-reflectively turns blame into an opportunity for self-examination. This selfcritical spirit is expressed in Analects 4:17: 㽟䊶ᗱ唞⛝ˈ㽟ϡ䊶㗠ܻ㞾ⳕгDŽ When you encounter good persons, think of becoming their equal. When you encounter inferior persons, examine yourself.

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“Pettiness” reveals itself to be a moral rather than a class designation in the Analects to the degree that it signifies the person who should know and do better and yet does not. In a claim further developed in the Mencius, the asymmetry of benevolence entails that the ordinary person’s resentment should not be judged and criticized in the same way as the person who acts out of resentment and pettiness despite enjoying more of the advantages of life. In contrast to the prevailing Western discourses of recognition and resentment, early Confucian ethics is asymmetrically concerned with those whose reactive and limited emotional lives negatively impact others: hence, there is a greater concern with the resentment of the rich and the powerful rather than the poor and the weak who deserve benevolence and equity rather than the blame, condemnation, and suffering too often interpersonally and social-structurally inflicted upon them.

Is the ethical the ultimate form of ressentiment? According to Nietzsche, in the Genealogy of Morals, what is conventionally conceived to be moral and the highest good is in fact lowly and only the ultimate realization of ressentiment. Indeed, impartial and universalized love is the highest fulfillment of ressentiment. This objection, despite Nietzsche’s own understanding of Confucius, misses the point of Confucianism. Other early Chinese non-Confucian sources, Mozi ๼ᄤ, for example, warned how lack of order, obedience, and mutual love allowed resentment and hatred to flourish.45 As with Xunzi 㤔ᄤ after him, Mozi contrasted “public righteousness” (gongyi ݀㕽) with private or selfish resentment (siyuan ⾕ᗼ).46 Even while early Confucian thinkers shared this terminology, they rejected Moist (mojia ๼ᆊ) doctrines of an impartial universal love as insufficient for caring for the concrete specific other and oneself. The universal ethical point of view or an altruistic moral perspective is an impossible ideal that is detrimental to ethical life that begins with family, friends, and neighbors rather than universally equal persons. The Mencius contains examples of how it is a moral ideal that cannot be performatively put into practice without falling into either contradictions or moralistic fanaticism. Early Confucian ethics offers a robust rationale for the cultivation of an asymmetrical and graded humaneness; for instance, of bringing comfort to the elderly, confidence to friends, and nurturance to the young in Analects 5: 26. This situated appropriateness contrasts with an undifferentiating objective stance or equalizing global feeling of love or sympathy. Impartiality does not

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entail neutrality; on the contrary, impartiality in the Confucian context requires being partial for those for whom one has greater responsibility and responsively addressing one’s moral concern to the specificity of who they are. The ethically noble person is thus described in Analects 4:10 as acting without prejudice. In Analects 2:14, the ethically exemplary person is described as being “all-embracing and not partial,” while the “inferior person is partial and not all-embracing” (৯ᄤ਼㗠ϡ↨ ᇣҎ↨㗠ϡ਼). Ethical agency presupposes affectively grounded yet reflective processes of discernment and judgment. The ethical agent cultivates his or her abilities to make distinctions about merit, character, and the significance of relative bonds of friendship, filiality, family, and familiarity. Confucian texts such as the Classic of Familial Reverence (Xiaojing ᄱ㍧) stress the asymmetrical responsibilities of parents to children, the old to the young, the powerful to the weak, and the wealthy to the poor. In its opening chapter, familial reverence is described as the root of education and remembrance of others as orientating self-cultivation (xiushen ׂ䑿).47 Familial reverence, the medium of moral life and its cultivation, accordingly does not aim at mere control and subordination. Its purpose is to prepare children for becoming autonomous and socially responsible moral agents who have a sense of their own individual moral life in relation to others.48 Scheler rejected Nietzsche’s privileging of the egotistical and heroic over the other-oriented and pacifistic, noting the former’s destructive effects in modern Europe—in particular the First World War—and the latter’s contributions to general happiness and well-being in the East, which was increasingly threatened through Westernization.49 Scheler critiqued Nietzsche’s thesis of the ascetic nature of altruism, distinguishing genuine sacrifice for the other from the domination of the other that transpires in the name of a higher good that is in reality born of ressentiment. If the person of ressentiment envies and damages others through love as a form of ultimately self-interested revenge, it is genuine love of the other rather than self-affirmation that is its opposite. Scheler accordingly claims that in his work on ressentiment: “I pointed out that it is precisely this aspect of true sacrifice which distinguishes true asceticism from the illusory asceticism of ressentiment.”50 The distinction between appropriate and inappropriate selfsacrifice reflects Scheler’s strategy of differentiating a genuine form of ideal values that would evade Nietzsche’s critical suspicions. This escape, however, presupposes that which Nietzsche has placed in doubt: a transcendent realm of ideal spiritual values and the eternal. It reveals his continuing affinities with his teacher Eucken’s philosophy of spirit.51

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An alternative strategy to the ones articulated in Scheler’s ethics of sympathy and Nietzsche’s ethos of self-affirmation is indicated in the early Confucian discourse of resentment. This strategy involves cultivating the self in the context of the real psychological motives of action. The lack of magnanimity associated with resentment, for instance, is not overcome by being negated and transcended in order to realize a superior state of being. It is rather recognized and confronted within the actual workings of the self. In early Confucian philosophy, ethical reflection and judgment have need of a realistic yet ethically oriented sense of human psychology and anthropology in order for the ethical to be enacted and practiced. Observing, listening, and learning from others becomes central to ethically interacting with others and cultivating one’s own disposition. The late Eastern Han dynasty philosopher Xu Gan ᕤᑍ (170–217) articulated in his Balanced Discourses (Zhonglun Ё䂪) how sociability—listening to others and attuning one’s feelings in relation to others—furthers and constitutes wisdom.52 It is better to cause resentment in others than to do wrong, such as—in an example in the biaoji 㸼㿬 chapter of the Book of Rites (Liji ⾂㿬)—causing resentment by refusing to make a promise that cannot be fulfilled. The resentment produced by the refusal to promise would be less damaging than the resentment that would result from breaking the promise. Wisdom includes not being an unnecessary cause of the other’s resentment. This wisdom extends to the art of government that necessitates taking action while minimizing “animosity and resentment.”53 It encompasses even the king’s ability to govern. The early Confucian discourses associated with the proper names of Mengzi and Xunzi portray how the king’s rule is destabilized by permitting the resentments of the people and other kings to flourish. The festering of resentment eats away at and dissolves the bonds of ethical life and the lifeworld. The consequent destruction of the ethical brings disaster upon families, communities, and society. The Confucian concern with counteracting and lessening reactive feelings in others, and with not provoking such feelings, is utilized in Confucian arguments for the necessity of ritual, music, and poetry for moral life. The purpose of this is to maintain the fabric of everyday life and stable government. These practices of ritual, music and poetry are not secondary ornamental considerations, as they instruct and orient agents, helping them to regulate their emotions appropriately. The rituals of everyday interactions and ritual propriety (li ⾂) accomplish more than a regulation of the emotions. They emancipate the self from its narrowness and place it into the fullness of life in all of its dimensions. The repeatedly stated esteem of Confucius for the Book of Odes (Shijing 䀽㍧) is centered in an appeal to their function in promoting ethical self-cultivation

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and balancing nature and nurture. The classic songs of Zhou ਼ need not serve to conservatively reinforce the conformity of traditional tastes. Poetry and music join one with others and with the self, allowing for the creative appropriation of contextual relationships. The odes teach sociality and the art of sociability; they promote self-contemplation and reveal how to regulate feelings of resentment (yuan ᗼ) and other destructive emotions.54 Confucian ethics requires confronting self-deception and false consciousness with honesty and straightforwardness of mind. It calls for honesty with oneself and others and for a recognition of one’s own resentment rather than its concealment, something which also concerned Nietzsche. The emphasis is on not feigning a moral condition one does not understand. In Analects 5:25, Confucius is said to explain: Ꮋ㿔ǃҸ㡆ǃ䎇ᙁˈᎺϬᯢᘹПˈϬѺᘹПDŽओᗼ㗠ট݊ҎˈᎺϬᯢᘹПˈ ϬѺᘹПDŽ Clever words, a pretentious appearance, and excessive courtesy: Zuo Qiuming found them shameful, and I also find them shameful. Concealing resentment and befriending the person resented: Zuo Qiuming found them shameful, and I also find them shameful.55

The Confucian critique of flattery and obsequiousness, as in Analects 1:15 and 2: 24, and promotion of a genuineness of feeling, straightforwardness of mind, and individual constancy in the face of social pressures point toward a resonance between the ethics of nobleness in the texts of Nietzsche and early Confucianism. James S. Hans has argued that both appreciate the reality and mechanisms of resentment in ordinary moral life. Neither employs guilt—the resentment against resentment—in a futile and toxic attempt to cure it and to better humanity through external discipline and internal self-negation.56 Both rely on their own variety of a project of individual and personal self-cultivation that encompasses emotion and reason. There is good reason not to proceed as far as Hans’ assertion that each practice of individuation occurs in an “aesthetic context without ground,” since there is no existential abyss in Confucian thought and self-cultivation is not merely aesthetic. Cultivation occurs in response to a web of aesthetic, ethical, and psychological conditions and claims.57 Nietzschean and early Confucian thought share a concern with the selfcultivation of genuineness and generosity stemming from self-affirmation and reject motivations formed by the negation of the other. They diverge insofar as Nietzsche performatively and evocatively focuses our concern on our own individuality in opposition to social conventions and pragmatic accommodations,

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whereas Confucians demonstrate how social rituals and conventions are a principal vehicle of ethical individuation rather than being mere conformity or a prudential self-betrayal of the genuinely ethical. It might be maintained in response to such a Confucian critique of Nietzsche that Nietzsche highlights the non-calculative generosity of the cultivated noble self. For example, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is an exemplar of the practice of selfcultivation (Bildung) that develops the highest bestowing virtue, which naturally and generously pours forth its gifts like the sun, without any expectation of return or exchange. There are numerous passages in praise of self-overflowing virtue in Nietzsche’s works, and such virtue is a key element of Nietzschean self-cultivation.58 Nonetheless, Nietzschean virtues always proceed from the self to the other without the Confucian concern with or recognition of the asymmetrical mutuality (shu ᘩ) of self and other in which ethics also proceeds from the other to the self. Nietzschean virtues of friendship and generosity are arguably akin to Confucian reciprocity and mutuality. Shu is a sharing with others without calculation, exchange, or an instrumental expectation of receiving something in return. They diverge from a Confucian perspective insofar as Nietzsche does not adequately articulate the “push” or extension (tui ᥼) that requires seeing and interpreting oneself from the other’s perspective and extending one’s responsiveness to widening circles of beings from the family to humanity and to the universe itself in the Neo-Confucian interpretation of Mengzi’s heart-mind (xin). The non-calculating and incalculable reciprocity between self and other is a basic feature of Confucian ethics that makes it a significant alternative to Western ethical models. There are traces of the earlier Confucian discourse of recognition and resentment in later Neo-Confucian texts that reconfirm the affinity and difference between the asymmetrical sociality of Confucian ethics and the asymmetrical individualism of Nietzschean ethics. Wang Yangming ⥟䱑 ᯢ, for instance, elucidates the idea of reciprocal reproof without causing resentment in oneself or others in his “Encouraging Goodness through Reproof.” The “way of friends” is the social realization of the good. It signifies both accepting reproof from others without feeling resentment toward them, since they are our best teachers, and moving others to improve themselves without fault-finding and without making them feel shame and resentment.59 Mozi described the non-resentful state of mind of the ethically exemplary person (junzi) as a self-confidence that is maintained even when mistaken for a non-exemplary person.60

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Confucian ethics and the politics of resentment In the early Confucian tradition of moral reflection, resentment is overcome through recognition. To appropriately know the self undermines negative affects against others and the course of “heaven” (tian ໽, which should be understood as signifying something closer to “nature” than to a spiritual realm), Xunzi accordingly stated: 㞾ⶹ㗙ϡᗼҎˈⶹੑ㗙ϡᗼ໽ᗼҎ㗙もˈᗼ໽㗙⛵ᖫDŽ༅ПᏅˈ ডПҎˈ䈜ϡ䖖Тઝ! Those who recognize themselves do not resent others; those who recognize fate do not resent heaven. Those who resent others are bound to fail; those who resent heaven do not learn from experience.61

In contrast to standard interpretations of Nietzsche’s philosophy, early Confucian thinking overcomes resentment through the ethical perspective of acting for the sake of others while examining oneself in order to achieve self-recognition. There are appeals to not resent “heaven” or “nature” (tian) in early Confucian writings, as evident in Confucius and Xunzi, which can be interpreted as conditions of its recognition and appreciation. Non-resentment is an epistemic as well as an ethical condition.62 In this context, recognizing oneself and others cannot be radically separated from recognizing heaven and nature, although the address to heaven or nature in Xunzi cannot be interpreted as an appeal to an otherworldly transcendence or an eternal order (to use Scheler’s language) but rather relies on the immanent course and order of the world. Scheler amended his philosophy of nature and philosophical anthropology, with its emergent levels of the organic, with a transcendent appeal to metaphysics and religion in order to introduce and justify his vision of spirit as the personal and interpersonal in human life. Zhang’s critique of Eucken can be reconstructed in regard to Scheler’s discourse. Confucian ethical discourses accomplish in an earthy, immanent, and humbler and more modest manner what Western religious philosophers, such as Scheler in his appeal to the eternal, require of the transcendent and divine.63 Confucian ethics offers elements of a philosophical framework for a contemporary immanent ethics of the other, for an altruism that is rooted in the moral relational feelings of the natural self, and in the reformation rather than the rejection of the natural and social-historical forces that condition and shape the realities of ethical life. A reconstructed Confucian philosophy offers an account of ethical personalism without requiring an essential or substantial non-relational and non-natural person, self, or spirit.

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This makes Confucian arguments potentially more philosophically compelling than traditional Western philosophical arguments that require substantial metaphysical and religious presuppositions. A reconstructed intercultural Confucian ethics, as envisioned by Zhang and other new Confucian thinkers, can engage in the critique and reformulation of Confucian traditions and perspectives. Historically, ru traditions have frequently been associated with anti-egalitarian, hierarchical, and traditionalist tendencies. Nonetheless, there are historical morally oriented reformist tendencies that prioritize the well-being of the other and the people. Such tendencies are also apparent in the Analects. Prioritizing the ethical while still connecting it with the pragmatic and instrumental concerns about welfare, Confucius is said to remark: “If there is equality, there will be no poverty; where there is peace, there is no lack of population.”64 Mengzi is portrayed as endeavoring to convince King Hui of Liang (ṕᚴ⥟) to extend (tui) from an immediate responsiveness to the suffering other to considerations of the general welfare and wellbeing of those one does not perceive. The alternative critical tendencies in the Confucian lineage come to word particularly in the book associated with Mengzi. Asymmetrical ethics appears there in the context of the self ’s natural responsiveness and cultivated responsibility toward others. In the Mencius, the cognitive-affective economy of humans is predisposed toward ethics without the problematic appeal to spirit and the transcendent that Scheler wielded against Nietzsche’s skepticism. It is, to appropriate a phrase from Owen Flanagan, “naturally structured for morality.”65 The genuine ethically exemplary person, and the genuine king whose legitimate power is based in the people and serves their well-being, not only acts for the sake of the people’s well-being but hears, listens, and responds to their voices rather than resenting their desires, demands, and perceived imperfections. In the opening passages of the book of Mencius, it is not the people but the flawed King Hui who is filled with narrow desires, limiting self-interest, and resentment against his people and neighboring kings. King Hui suffers from his incapacity to recognize that others are suffering and to extend his heartmind toward others. However, despite the king’s excuses, he is not naturally or constitutively unable to do these things. As Mengzi reveals to the king’s discomfort in their reported conversation, King Hui is affectively and reflectively unwilling to be responsive to, and take responsibility for, those affected by his misuse of his position, power, and wealth. A parallel point about the resentment of the powerful against the weak is made in Mozi’s statement: “Great rivers do not resent the little streams that fill them because they are what can make them great” (ᰃᬙ∳⊇ϡᚵᇣ䈋ПⓓᏅгˈᬙ㛑໻).66

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Conclusion: A critical intercultural Confucianism Scheler noted in On the Eternal in Humans (Vom Ewigen im Menschen, 1921), in a chapter on the need for a reconstruction of European culture in response to its crisis, how “the specifically European and Asiatic” would find themselves in a situation of increasing parity and how Europe needs to reappraise itself culturally in contrast with the East and reassess what they hold in common.67 Humanity has entered an age of “world-adjustment” in which they need to learn to engage, communicate, and cooperate with others. The privilege of the West has gradually fallen into question through the changing social-political circumstances of the last century. Scheler did not call for a new unity between East and West as other Weimar-era cosmopolitans had done. He called for European self-reflection and world-adjustment in response to Asia and the world. The intercultural task of a European self-reassessment and reappraisal in light of the non-European world, which Scheler called for almost a century ago, has already been underway in the West and remains unfinished and yet to come. The line of argumentation analyzed in this chapter from the Analects and the Mencius continues to have a significant critical import for contemporary ethical and political reflection. Analyzing the dialectic of recognition and ressentiment exposes the ideological uses of the “politics of resentment” that is characteristics of the politics of nationalism and ethnocentrism, and which Nietzsche’s conception of the simmering condition of ressentiment fails to sufficiently analyze. Early Confucian philosophy contends that when either coercion and force or power and wealth are abused, the people will be naturally resentful. Confucian thinkers concluded that the resentment of non-elites against elites is ethically less blameworthy and politically less problematic than the arrogance, enmity, and resentment of elites against non-elites. Such resentment is evident in contemporary political discourses concerning the distribution of wealth and power that tend to blame the poor, the weak, and the voiceless for their conditions. Daniel A. Bell intriguingly recognizes how “the traditional Confucian ways may assert themselves against—or at least mitigate—negative emotions such as resentment and aggressive nationalism.”68 The Confucian insight into negative emotions is taken a step further in this chapter. On the basis of the alternate “critical” and transformative tendencies articulated in the classical ru tradition itself, particularly in texts such as the Mencius, a contemporary Confucian interpretation of asymmetrical responsibility can well be argued to

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provide a number of compelling reasons for promoting social-political equality, challenging asymmetrical claims of static hierarchical privilege that serve as an illegitimate justification or excuse for opposing greater fairness and equity among the people. Confucian philosophy is not only Chinese; it is already becoming a philosophy that can help promote reflection and reevaluation in the West. Early Confucian ethics is more than a reverence for the past and tradition, and not merely an incarnation of resentment against the present as Lu and Nietzsche asserted. It can accomplish the task of being a progressively oriented critical practical philosophy, as thinkers such as Zhang envisioned as discussed in Chapter 2, by contesting and deconstructing instead of furthering resentments and the condition of ressentiment. A contemporary interculturally reconstructed model of Confucian ethics can accomplish such a critical and ethically transformative undertaking by contesting and deconstructing instead of furthering conditions of misrecognition and the negative reactive emotions such as resentment that such conditions foster. This chapter is written in the hope of contributing to and furthering the project of a critical and diagnostic intercultural Confucian ethics.

4

Technology and the Way: Daoism in Buber and Heidegger

Introduction: The perils of intercultural philosophy Comparative intercultural philosophy continues to face entrenched skepticism from the professional philosophical establishment, despite centuries of engagement and dialogue between philosophies of diverse provenance. In the contexts of German and Chinese philosophy, a number of significant modern German thinkers from Leibniz and Wolff to Martin Buber (1878–1965) and Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) have engaged Chinese thought with varying degrees of seriousness. At the same time, German philosophers such as—to name a few prominent examples—Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx, and Heidegger have become an established part of modern Chinese discourses. A cursory glance at the philosophy sections of Western and Chinese bookstores reveals an abundance of translations and interpretive works. There is an ongoing intellectual exchange, despite the neglect and in some cases open hostility in institutional settings; yet the question lingers whether there is or can be mutual understanding. The suspicion remains that a comparative or cross-cultural encounter is bound to miss the essential intrinsic content of one discourse or the other. Even in this age suspicious of essentialism, there is hesitation concerning whether Westerners can grasp the genuine meaning of Chinese classics, just as Chinese intellectuals have fashioned their own understandings and interpretations of European thought in ways that diverge from their European contexts. There is a hermeneutical dilemma in interpreting texts from other traditions, which radicalizes interpretive problems that already occur within the same cultural milieu. On the one hand, if the interpretive measure of meaning requires the reader to comprehend the real intentions of the author, or the author in his or her full historical context, then there has never been a European

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encounter with a classical Chinese text such as the Zhuangzi 㥞ᄤ or—for that matter—perhaps not yet even a Chinese encounter. There has in this case never been a genuine reception of Chinese philosophy in German philosophy, since these interpretations from Leibniz and Wolff to Buber and Heidegger are based more or less on their own presuppositions, inadequate translations, and a lack of familiarity with the cultural context and language in which these texts were initially composed and transmitted. If such a hermeneutical measure is too stringent, since it makes understanding others virtually impossible, the opposite approach of unrestricted charity would be too lax. That is, on the other hand, both scholarly experts and the actual practitioners of a tradition will appropriately demand hermeneutical standards to distinguish genuinely expert readings from superficial external impositions and anachronistic or ideologically driven appropriations foisted onto a text by idiosyncratic philosophers and popular audiences from different cultural situations. Intercultural philosophy appears captured in a dilemma between rigorous but potentially overly narrow expertise and free and open but potentially ill-informed communication. The question of the possibility of a genuinely intercultural philosophizing is of pressing concern in the context of this chapter that addresses two early twentieth-century German philosophers: (1) who used and adopted images and strategies from the early Daoist (daojia 䘧ᆊ) classics, the Daodejing 䘧ᖋ㍧ and the Zhuangzi, and (2) whose thinking appears to be impacted by them to the extent that it is possible to be influenced by texts read in translation and through the mediations of a different historical and cultural nexus. One instance of East-West philosophical interaction and intertextual hybridity, which a dominant Eurocentric ideology denies in assuming the autonomy and isolation of Western philosophy, is evident in German philosophical reflections about the interconnections and tensions between technology, spirituality, and poetry in the modern world. Weimar-era intellectuals such as Count Hermann Alexander von Keyserling, Theodor Lessing, and Richard Wilhelm, discussed in Chapter 2, contrasted Daoist spontaneity and naturalness with the alienation and mechanization of the modern Western organization of life. In the current chapter, an exemplary case of the intertextuality between Chinese and Western thought is examined through an interpretation of how images, metaphors, and ideas from the texts associated with Laozi 㗕ᄤ and Zhuangzi were taken up in early twentiethcentury German philosophy. This interest in the Laozi and Zhuangzi encompasses a diverse range of thinkers such as Buber, Heidegger, and Georg Misch. Heidegger’s encounter with Daoism has been widely discussed, yet the

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interpretive context of this encounter has been rarely considered. One task of this chapter is to address issues of historical intercultural inspiration in Buber and Heidegger (Misch will be taken up again in Chapter 5), if not directly the relative accuracy or inaccuracy of their readings, and a second task is to examine philosophical questions concerning the fate of humanity in the age of technology and, remarkably, how the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi became sources for the twentieth-century German philosophical debate about the modern scientific and technological worldview and how to respond to it in the profoundly different philosophies of Buber and Heidegger.1

Part One: Daoism and German Philosophy Daoism in modern German philosophy The dominant tendency in the German reception of Chinese thought from Kant and Hegel to Weber and Rosenzweig has interpreted the classical “LaoZhuang” Daoism, associated with the names Laozi and Zhuangzi, as a form of mysticism in which the practitioner is absorbed in the sensuous elemental forces of natural existence while, at the same time, being lost in the fantastic and the imaginary. Classical Daoism is perceived in this reception as simultaneously overly materialistic and mystical, subordinating the individual person—and thus ethical personhood—to nature and the feeling of its elemental forces. Kant described Daoism according to the aesthetic-ethical category of the “grotesque,” while Rosenzweig identified Daoism a hundred years later with a deficient lack of character and particularity in what he described as the “impersonality of feeling.” Accordingly, for Kant, describing what he understood to be the Chinese aesthetic: What ridiculous grotesqueries do the verbose and studied complements of the Chinese not contain; even their paintings are grotesque and represent marvelous and unnatural shapes, the likes of which are nowhere to be found in the world. They also have venerable grotesqueries, for the reason that they are of ancient usage, and no people in the world has more of them than this one.2

The loss of the person and the human in nature and the religious, which Kant perceives in Eastern wisdom, is an issue to which he and the subsequent tradition from Hegel to Rosenzweig repeatedly returned. Unlike Leibniz and Buber, and akin to Malebranche and Rosenzweig who condemned Asian philosophies for being Spinozist, Asian forms of thought are identified with the

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mystical experience of nature and assimilated to Spinoza in Kant’s lectures on religion from the mid-1780s. Kant claimed: To expect this [e.g., divine participation] in the present life is the business of mystics and theosophists. Thus arises the mystical self-annihilation of China, Tibet, and India, in which one deludes oneself that one is finally dissolved into the Godhead. Fundamentally one might just as well call Spinozism a great enthusiasm as a form of atheism.3

Such an atheistic mysticism or enthusiastic naturalism is incoherent according to Kant, as it breaches the transcendental separation between immanence and transcendence, the sensible and its conditions and the supersensible about which nothing cognitively meaningful can be stated. Kant’s depiction in this passage not only targets Buddhism, given his interpretation of Daoism and its identification with the monstrous and grotesque in “The End of All Things.” In language that partly evokes the ru ‫ ۦ‬or Confucian disapproval of Buddhism and Daoism that informed the Jesuit transmission of Neo-Confucian interpretations, Kant identified Laozi, and generalizes it to all “Oriental” peoples, in the Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764) with the moral-aesthetic category of the “grotesque”: From this [improper dabbling in the transcendent] comes the monstrous system of Lao-kiun [i.e., Laozi] concerning the highest good, that it consists in nothing, i.e., in the consciousness of feeling oneself swallowed up in the abyss of the Godhead by flowing together with it, and hence by the annihilation of one’s personality; in order to have a presentiment of this state Chinese philosophers, sitting in dark rooms with their eyes closed, exert themselves to think and sense their own nothingness. Hence the pantheism (of the Tibetans and other oriental peoples); and in consequence from its philosophical sublimation Spinozism is begotten…4

In line with the Western ontotheological transmission, and its interpretation of the nothing will be at issue in the final chapter of the present work, Kant interpreted the nothing and nothingness as primarily negative and derivative of being. “Daoist pantheism” signifies for Kant the celebration of the nothing in the world rather than as an affirmation of the myriad things in their self-so-ness and life in its immanent significance. The German philosophical reception of Daoism is much less developed compared to the reception of Confucianism and Buddhism. It is characteristic that in more recent history Karl Jaspers included Confucius as one of the four great paradigmatic thinkers in the first volume of The Great Philosophers and Laozi appeared only in a later volume as a metaphysical thinker of the origin.5

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The early European interpretations of Daoism advanced diverse and contradictory views of Laozi and his teaching. A 1769 edition of collections of travel descriptions translated into German depicted Laozi as an atheistic materialist and leader of a sect consisting of “nothing but a confused fabric of all sorts of excuses and godlessness” (“nichts anders als ein verwirrtes Gewebe von allerhand aus Schweifungen und Gottlosigkeiten”).6 The philosopher, historian, and geographer Karl Hammerdörfer, interpreting dao as God, portrayed Laozi in a popular book on world history from 1789 as a complete religious dreamer or enthusiast (“vollendeter Schwärmer”), whose teaching was incompatible with rational religion and pure Deism.7 Laozi was interpreted in the early European reception of Daoism as a religious fanatic, an otherworldly mystic, a cosmic metaphysician of dao construed as reason or the absolute, a personal political advisor and strategist to kings, or as a materialist philosopher of private tranquility akin to Epicurus. Such expositions typically distinguished the “private” and “speculative” orientation of Daoism with the public and practical orientation of Confucianism. In contrast to the dismissive evaluation of Daoism of his predecessors, such as Kant and Hegel, and his own negative assessment of Confucius as antiSocrates examined in Chapter 1, the mature Schelling has a brief but thoughtprovoking account of Laozi in his Philosophy of Mythology. He rejected the previous elucidation of dao as reason (Vernunft), which Hegel had also used. Schelling interpreted dao instead as gateway (Pforte), a gateway between the unknowing of finite being and the genuine knowing of actual being (das wirkliche Seyn).8 Dao, construed as real being as potency (Können, erste Potenz, which comprises both all and nothing), requires an art or wisdom of practical knowing and living through the play of polarities, of not-being and being.9 The Daodejing is for Schelling “purely philosophical,” rather than mythological, and of the “highest interest.” It does not develop a systematic account of nature, but rather exhibits the confrontation of a principle (Auseinandersetzung eines Princips) with myriad forms.10 In the second half of the nineteenth-century, a number of authors inside and outside Germany would compare Laozi’s thinking with that of Schelling as examples of speculative or transcendental systems of reason and the absolute in nature.11 The German reception of Daoism underwent a transformation in the early twentieth century that is evident in the difference between Rosenzweig, whose opinions about Daoism and China are closely aligned to those of Kant and Hegel, and Buber, who actively engaged with Chinese sources in translation as well as Sinological research.

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Rosenzweig’s vision of Daoism is of a philosophy of the all-absorbing impersonal “it” (es) in which it would be better to not even use the word “I” (ich).12 He classified Daoism and Buddhism in his Star of Redemption as primitive forms of atheism, as all pantheism in fact must be in the end in his account. The pantheist can no longer celebrate and be intoxicated by the mythic pagan gods, who are still “living” and not merely nothing.13 Ascending only “half-way” from the gods to God by misconstruing nothingness as divine, Rosenzweig contends that Daoism and Buddhism cannot recognize and reach toward the monotheistic essence of God.14 Devoid of all essence and substance, and embracing characterless nonaction rather than the active and engaged ethical personality, the teachings of nirvana and the dao flee from the “voice of the true God” into the negativity and lack that is nothingness, while the trace of the divine voice is lost in the echoes of the “empty room of non-thought.”15 As already noted in Chapter 1 on Confucianism, and as considered further in Chapter 7 on his encounter with Zen Buddhism, Buber had a remarkably different hermeneutical approach toward Buddhist and Chinese philosophy than that of his friend and colleague Rosenzweig, with whom he shares many common concerns as well as the project of developing an ethical dialogical personalism. While Confucianism had a long if mixed reception in modern German philosophy, Daoism was on the whole ignored and dismissed and had to wait until the twentieth-century to enter into a more substantial philosophically fruitful dialogue with German philosophy.

The Hasidic Zhuangzi Heidegger’s familiarity with the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi in German translation has been frequently noted in discussions of his engagement with Eastern thinking. Heidegger is reported to have repeatedly read Buber’s 1910 edition of selections from the Zhuangzi, Reden und Gleichnisse des Tschuang Tse, which Buber translated from the English translations of James Legge and Herbert Allen Giles into German and published with Insel Verlag in 1910.16 There has been extensive analysis of the few passages where Heidegger evokes early Lao-Zhuang Daoist images and ideas. Little attention has, however, been devoted to how Heidegger’s brief allusions to and employs of Daoist ideas, images, and metaphors might be shaped by his sources: in particular, the translations of Buber and Wilhelm.17 There is accordingly good reason for us to reconsider this context for both historical and philosophical reasons.

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First, Buber’s edition of the Zhuangzi cannot in any way be understood as a neutral medium for presenting the Zhuangzi text to German readers. It intentionally and selectively focuses on the poetic and narrative presentation of ideas in the Zhuangzi. Second, Buber’s edition contains a long afterword that makes his interpretation of the Zhuangzi explicit. There he develops the continuity and the transformation of the “teaching of the Way” (die Lehre des Weges, daojiao 䘧ᬭ) from the Daodejing into what he considers its fullest actualization in Zhuangzi. In this early account from 1910, Buber expresses great sympathy for the Zhuangzi in contrast with the Daodejing, a contrast that he will later revise. Unlike what he construes to be the more monistic, elemental, mystical, and anti-linguistic presentation of the teaching of the dao that Buber sees in Laozi, echoing its interpretation in earlier German philosophers, the teaching of the Way is enacted through a more indirect, playful, and poetic dialogical language. What appears inhuman and monstrous in the Daodejing appears in a more human form in the naturalism of the Zhuangzi.18 The teaching of the way is realized more communicatively through language in the Zhuangzi and is therefore existentially more genuinely and fully enacted. There is a clear alignment between his approach to the Zhuangzi in the 1910 publication and his own philosophy that received its fullest articulation in his classic dialogical personalist work I and Thou (Ich und Du, first published in German in 1923). Buber’s visualization of Zhuangzi in 1910 is that of a sage who resembles in certain respects the Hasidic Rabbis and masters of whom Buber wrote during this period. The young Buber emerged as an early scholar and interpreter of Hasidism, a movement in Eastern European Judaism that focused on the piety and spirituality of ordinary people and the immanence of the divine in everyday life. Hassidim or chassidim (‫ )חסידות‬signifies “piety” or “loving kindness” in Hebrew. It indicates for Buber a spiritual feeling of life and way of living and dwelling within the world. This means in Buber’s interpretation of the Hasidic encounter with and experience of the divine that God—similar to his vision of the dao—is internal to or “immanent within the world,” “and is brought to perfection” through human life in the world as the co-creation of the world.19 Buber’s earliest works are primarily translations and interpretations of Hasidic and Chinese sources. Buber’s edition of Chinesische Geister- und Liebesgeschichten (Chinese Ghost and Love Stories) published in 1911 is a translation from English into German of a collection of stories drawn from the Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio (Liaozhai zhiyi 㘞唟䁠⭄) of Pu Songling 㪆ᵒ唵.20 These strange stories of seductive fox spirits (huli jing ⢤⣌㊒), angry

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ghosts, Confucian scholars, Buddhist monks, and religious Daoist exorcists reveal aspects of the dao refracted through the popular imagination akin to the Hasidic storyteller. The Hasidic master is the Eastern European teacher of Judaism who teaches the spiritual through evocatively enacting and living the symbolic in story, song, and poetry. In the exemplary cases of Chinese Daoist and Jewish Hasidic teaching (lehren), parable teaches more experientially and primordially than doctrine and theory: “The parable is the engagement of the absolute into the world of things.”21 The poetic and narrative enactment of the teaching is more fundamental than its doctrinal and theoretical presentations or its being hidden in silence and ineffable that he associated with the Daodejing in 1910; silence is only the condition of the word, as the communication of the teaching is the teaching itself. Analogous to the Hasidic narrators of Yiddish tales of the golem, the wandering Jew, magic wielding Rabbis who protect the community from a hostile world, the dybbuk or malevolent lost soul who possesses the young and the innocent, shape shifting and talking beasts, and tales of gilgul or reincarnated souls, popular Chinese tales such as those of Pu Songling are taken to be “Daoist” in communicating the uncanny supernatural sensibility through evocative images and affective words. Buber’s Zhuangzi teaches through surprising dialogical reversals, strange and unusual stories of humans, animals, and spirits, and most importantly through humor and laughter. The Zhuangzi is exemplary for Buber because it teaches through humor. The affective and non-cognitive dimension proves to be a more essential way of addressing and shifting the mood, the ethos, and way of living of the listener or reader. Reversing typical criticisms of the Zhuangzi as a mystical escape and quietist withdrawal from the world, Buber’s Zhuangzi fulfills the teaching of the dao by playfully returning it to the images and words of ordinary life with a free and easy meandering comportment (xiaoyao you 䗡䘭䘞) within life in order to nurture and nourish it (yangsheng 仞⫳). Buber distinguishes Zhuangzi’s immanent liberation within the world from the seriousness and almost inhuman endorsement of silence expressed in the Daodejing. However, despite this early critique, the Daodejing would replace the Zhuangzi as his preferred text in discussions of Daoism by the 1920s. In his 1910 account, each Lao-Zhuang Daoist text responds to what is “needful” in human existence.22 The needful can only be realized in the wholeness of this worldly life; that is, in the “central life” and “truthful life” of the zhenren ⳳ Ҏ.23 Maurice S. Friedman describes Buber’s version of the genuine or perfected person (zhenren) as the one who harmonizes the greatest transformations (hua ࣪) with the fullest sense of unity.24 In a description that captures an element of

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Judaism as well as Daoism, Buber concludes that to be one with the dao is to constantly renew creation and life in the everyday and the ordinary.25 In this sense, Daoism is not the anti-ethical or nihilistic philosophy that some modern proponents and critics conceive it as. It is essentially an ethical teaching of the good that warns against the separation from and destruction of creation through its notion of non-doing (wuwei ⛵⚎), as non-interfering and non-harming the life of others.26 Buber’s Zhuangzi accordingly indicates a more fundamental teaching than the flights and fancies of otherworldly mysticism, which it pokes fun at in the figure of Liezi ߫ᄤ, as genuine unity is practicable only immanently in the midst of the dynamic changes of life and nature.27 Zhuangzi transformed and perfected Laozi’s teaching of the way by communicatively bringing it back to immanent life in Buber’s early interpretation. The Daodejing responds to the needful in terms of a silent contemplation of a unitary mystical unity. It is the elemental, yet not the fulfilled. It is a life of solitude and concealment in which Laozi does not talk with others but only with and to concealment itself. In contrast to the hiddenness and consequent incompleteness of the teaching in Laozi, the Zhuangzi fulfills the needful within everyday ordinary existence through the dynamic, playful, and transformative oneness in multiplicity that can be taught only in the “complete speech” of parable. The non-monistic playing of oneness in multiplicity and difference in the one is Buber’s gloss on the music or panpipes of heaven. Here, the oneness of the world is at the same time the oneness of each singular thing that can only be considered “from out of itself.” The way is not distinct from each thing in which it is enacted: “Each thing manifests dao through the way of its existence, through its life.”28 The “love of things” and love of the world articulated in the dao-teaching embraces and nourishes life (yangsheng) in each thing and releases things through “non-doing” (wuwei). Typically, the Jewish and Chinese understandings of the world are seen as opposites; according to Hall and Ames, for instance, one accentuates otherworldly divine transcendence and the other this-worldly natural immanence.29 In contrast, Buber perceives in both Hasidic Judaism and Lao-Zhuang Daoism tendencies toward the humanistic actualization of the transcendent in the immanent, of the sacred in the mundane, in everyday life through exemplary figures and genuine teachers teaching the needful and the authentic life. Buber speaks of the Daoist genuine person (zhenren) in this Jewish-Chinese comparative context as renewing and perfecting creation in “surrendering.” The human being in Judaism and Daoism is a necessary co-creator of the world.

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Despite the prevalence of anti-humanistic elucidations of early Daoism, the role of the human in the balance of nature and in nourishing life is articulated in Chapter 6 of the Zhuangzi (Dazongshi ໻ᅫ᏿). It is precisely the genuine person who adeptly bridges and nourishes the natural and the human: “When neither heaven nor humanity wins over the other, this is called being a genuine person (zhenren).”30 Buber’s interpretation of classical Daoism resists identifying it with an indifferent resignation or unresponsive passivity: renouncing violence against things, as is distinctive of modern Western technological civilization, wuwei “helps all beings to their freedom” and “redeems them out of the slavery of violence and machinery.”31 Buber’s language of a non-coercive surrendering, letting, and nondoing anticipated and perhaps influenced Heidegger’s way of speaking.32

Part Two: Daoism and the Question Concerning Technology Responding to technological modernity with Daoist wuwei Buber returned to the theme of the burdens of modern science and technology in “China and Us,” a lecture delivered at a conference held at Richard Wilhelm’s China Institute in Frankfurt in 1928.33 Buber argued for the impossibility of Europeans escaping the weight of technological modernity in his reflections on the question—posed by Wilhelm—of whether Chinese wisdom offers a genuine attainable alterative for modern European civilization. Buber contends, as Heidegger likewise would, that adopting a Chinese way would require forsaking the European way. There is, he affirms, no “going back behind all this industrializing and technicizing and mechanizing,” and hence modern Western civilization, because without technological modernity European civilization would lose its specific dao: “We” modern Europeans “would no longer proceed on the way at all; we would, in general no longer have a way.”34 The Chinese dao is consequently impossible to realize under Western conditions. Buber contends that modern Europeans cannot escape technology and science, nor should they desire to abandon these as they have become integral to the path itself as it has been undertaken and, of course, provide much for the improvement of human physical and intellectual existence. Nevertheless, sharing in the anxiety of Weimar intellectuals, Buber perceives a modern civilization deeply shaken by chaos and crisis. “This Europe,” the one infected by irrationality and tempted

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by power and authoritarian strong “leaders,” is accordingly in need of hearing an elemental teaching from China after all. Europeans, he contends, need to learn something to temper and contest the relentless drive for instrumental power over things found in modern Western science and society. Buber maintained in “China and Us” that it is difficult to imagine any experience that could possibly challenge the modern conception of life as the exercise of the will to power and a relentless struggle for existence. Yet, such a path is indeed indicated in the writings of Laozi and Zhuangzi. Daoist “nondoing,” which Buber interprets as a non-coercive and responsive doing, is the key experience and conception that Europe can learn and adopt from China in order to temper its thirst for power and the domination over things and others.35 Wuwei can teach a humanity consumed by technological and historical success that such success comes with substantial costs in human suffering.36 Inspired by his encounter with Chinese Daoism, and his interpretation of the dynamic of the useless and the useful in the Zhuangzi, Buber concluded that success can be the loss of what is genuinely human, and non-success can be its genuine realization: I believe that we can receive from China in a living manner something of the Daoist teaching of “non-action,” the teaching of Laozi. And for the reason that bearing our burden on our way we have learned something analogous, only negatively on the reverse side, so to speak. We have begun to learn, namely, that success is of no consequence. We have begun to doubt the significance of historical success, i.e. the validity of the person who sets an end for himself, carries this end into effect, accumulates the necessary means of power and succeeds with these means of power: the typical modern Western person. I say, we begin to doubt the content of existence of this person.

It is in this space that an encounter between Chinese wisdom and European reality becomes possible and necessary. This encounter and learning experience cannot occur to the same degree through Confucian philosophy. Buber argued Confucianism is (1) overly ethically demanding for a modernized Western form of life consumed by egoism, power, and wealth, (2) inapplicable in the Western context given Confucianism’s Chinese cultural presuppositions that require a particular form of ethical bonds between generations as well as the living and the dead, and, (3) inappropriate for addressing the basic crisis of modern Western civilization and its insatiable drive for power, progress, and accumulation. What is “needful” in the modern Western context is precisely a revolutionary transformative teaching that pulls the egotistical yet fractured and dispersed modern self out of its absorption in frantic activities, ravenous consumption, and

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compulsive obsession for success. The transformative teaching that addresses the neediness of modern humanity would allow the self to be with itself as well as with others and the myriad things with which it interacts. This is the “deeply Chinese” understanding of the way taught in the books of Laozi and Zhuangzi: And there we come into contact with something genuine and deeply Chinese, though not, to be sure, Confucian: with the teaching that genuine effecting is not interfering, not giving vent to power, but remaining within one’s self. This is the powerful existence that does not yield historical success, i.e. the success that can be exploited and registered in this hour, but only yields that effecting that at first appears insignificant, indeed invisible, yet endures across generations and there at times becomes perceptible in another form. At the core of each historical success hides the turning away from what the person who accomplished it really had in mind. Not realization, but the hidden non-realization that has been disguised or masked just through success is the essence of historical success.

A divergent vision of living and nourishing human life than the modern Western failed one is revealed in early Lao-Zhuang Daoist texts. Buber considered these sources to be the opposite of and to indicate a significant correction to the compulsive drive for and the instrumental calculation of success: Opposed to it stands the changing of persons that takes place in the absence of success, the changing of persons through the fact that one effects without interfering. It is … in the commencing knowledge of this action without doing, action through non-action, of this powerfulness of existence, that we can have contact with the great wisdom of China.

Buber concludes his discussion of this passage by noting how it is suffering and foolishness, and with an uncanny foreboding of the pending disaster that would soon swallow Europe and the world with National Socialism, the Shoah, and the Second World War, which has brought Europe on the verge of its own self-produced abyss and the need to discover for itself Laozi’s teaching of wuwei: With us this knowledge does not originate as wisdom but as foolishness. We have obtained a taste of it in the bitterest manner; indeed, in a downright foolish manner. But there where we stand or there where we shall soon stand, we shall directly touch upon the reality for which Laozi spoke.37

It should be noted that, despite his reservations about Laozi’s mysticism in 1910, Buber’s discussions of Daoism in the 1920s and afterwards focus on the more ethical-political Daodejing rather than the Zhuangzi. The mature Buber was particularly interested in its political dimension, as evident in his translation into Hebrew of the chapters of the Daodejing on politics.38

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Heidegger, technology, and the way There is sufficient evidence of Heidegger’s familiarity with the Zhuangzi, though the preponderance of his published remarks related to Lao-Zhuang Daoism concern the Daodejing.39 Heidegger was acquainted with Buber’s 1910 edition of the Zhuangzi fairly early in the 1920s. It is reported that he read aloud and discussed the exchange between Zhuangzi and Huizi ᚴᄤ concerning whether humans can understand the enjoyment of fish from Chapter 17 (qiushui ⾟∈) of the Zhuangzi. It is reported that Heidegger illustrated his own conception of Mitsein (being-with) of human Dasein (being-there) through Zhuangzi’s playful evocation of the inhuman perspective of fish.40 Heidegger’s continuing interest in Zhuangzi is indicated by his reading of the “simile of the carillon stand” from Chapter 19 of the Zhuangzi in a discussion of metaphor, image, and language around thirty years later.41 In this chapter on “Fulfilling Life” (dasheng 䘨⫳), a non-instrumental artistry is an image of how to live; the wooden bell stand (Glockenspielstände) appears as if it were the work of spirits and is formed through a responsive artistry that is born of the fasting of the heart-mind (xin ᖗ) and without relying on instrumental technique, skill, expectation, or calculation. A third example occurs in the context of Heidegger’s postwar thinking in a dialogue between an older and younger prisoner of war, in his Country Path Conversations of 1944–1945, concerning “letting come” as waiting in contrast with calculative expectation and learning as coming to know the needful instead of the accumulation of information or technical skills. Heidegger’s dialogue reenacted, without explicitly mentioning Zhuangzi, in this work the conversation between Zhuangzi and Huizi concerning “the necessity of the unnecessary.”42 The “uses of the useless” in Chapter 26 of the Zhuangzi (waiwu ໪⠽) signals an alternative to the restless accumulation, consumption, and reduction of thinking to calculation that is distinctive of technological modernity. This point is elaborated by Heidegger in his quotation of the story of the “useless tree” from Richard Wilhelm’s translation of Chapter 1 of the Zhuangzi (xiaoyao you) in a discussion concerning traditional and technical language in 1962.43 Heidegger’s indirect references to the Zhuangzi refer either to its multi-perspectivalism or to its, hybridized and intertextual, relation to the modern Western question of technique. Both reveal Heidegger’s dependence on a modern Western interpretive context developed in Buber and Wilhelm. Country Path Conversations has further affinities with early Daoist sources. The liberation of the unnecessary and the useless revealed in the Zhuangzi

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clarifies the orienting claim of this conversation: “The fact that the unnecessary remains at all times the most necessary of all.”44 In a discussion that resonates with the early Daoist concern with “nourishing life” (yangsheng) through a noncoercive letting, the unnecessary is distinguished from the relentless necessity of goals and purposes that has furthered the impoverishment of life under the guise of securing and improving human life.45 The calculative reduction and exploitation of things results in the impoverishment of one’s own life according to Heidegger’s dialogue. The older man in Heidegger’s dialogue described how humans fail to “let things be in their restful repose (Ruhe)”; humans, he claimed, instead reify things as “ob-jects” [Gegen-stände] by setting them toward themselves.46 The younger describes in response the restless pursuit of things that forces itself upon them and transforms things “into mere resources for his needs and items in his calculations, and into mere opportunities for advancing and maintaining his manipulations.”47 The coercion and compulsion of the necessary have led to “devastation” and desertification (Verwüstung); that is to say, according to Heidegger, it is “the process of the desolation of the earth and of human existence.”48 The unnecessary appears all too lacking in necessity and purpose from a calculative point of view; yet the freedom of “being able to let (Lassenkönnen)” is the dimension where healing occurs.49 A primary characteristic of Heidegger’s later philosophy is how to expose and open oneself to this healing power of life and the holy (heilig) that he identified with the dimension of healing (heil), which has increasingly become alien and invisible in technologically determined life, through a calm letting releasement (Gelassenheit) that frees the self through liberating things. Heidegger elsewhere articulated the openness of being (Sein) in relation to his conception of nothingness and emptiness. As in Lao-Zhuang Daoism, these are not merely negative or privative notions of negation and lack. Heidegger drew on images of emptiness and the way from the Daodejing. Paul Shih-yi Hsiao (Xiao Shiyi 㭁᏿↙) described how, as a visiting scholar in Freiburg after the end of the Second World War, he and Heidegger engaged in conversations concerning the Daodejing and translated sections of the text together into German.50 These efforts are visible in Heidegger’s later uses of Daoist images. In a number of places, for instance, Heidegger specifically attended to the “emptiness” articulated in the Daodejing. He interpreted the emptiness of the empty space of the spoke, the vessel, and the house in Chapter 11 as indicative of the ontological difference as an open spacing between beings (Seiende) and being (Sein). Its last sentence “you zhi yiwei li, wu zhi yiwei yong” ᳝Пҹ⚎߽ˈ⛵П ҹ⚎⫼, which might be conventionally translated as “benefit from that which

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exists, use that which is not,” is rendered into Heidegger’s ontological language in a 1943 text on Hölderlin, ‘‘The Singularity of the Poet” (“Die Einzigkeit des Dichters”), as: “Beings yield to usability, non-being grants being” (“Das Seiende ergibt die Brauchbarkeit, das Nicht-Seiende gewährt das Sein”).51 Heidegger construes you ᳝ (typically translated as to have, to be, to exist)  as “beings” and yong ⫼ (normally translated as use) as “being” in light of his thinking of the ontological difference. It is the perspective of being (Sein), gained through the encounter with non-being (Nicht-Seiende) here and emptiness (das Leere) elsewhere, which releases and liberates beings (Seiende) from their bondage in the usefulness of usage and consumption. Heidegger’s Zhuangzian concern with usefulness/uselessness is accordingly also at work in his appropriation of the Daodejing. In a passage from “The Thing” (“Das Ding,” 1950), Heidegger depicted the emptiness of Laozi’s “empty vessel” (zhong ⲙ) as the condition of the vessel’s holding: [W]hat is impermeable is not yet what does the holding. When we fill the jug, the pouring that fills it flows into the empty jug. The emptiness, the void, is what does the vessel’s holding. The empty space, this nothing of the jug, is what the jug is as the holding vessel.52

The “thingliness of the thing” cannot consist of mere materiality but consists instead in emptiness; it is not matter but rather it is “the empty” that is the possibility of being held. Heidegger envisions the holding through the empty as the possibility of the gift of outpouring; the nourishing outpouring and generosity of water and wine, of sun and earth, mark the crossing of the open “between” in the marriage of heaven and earth: Even the empty jug retains its nature by virtue of the poured gift, even though the empty jug does not admit of a giving out. But this nonadmission belongs to the jug and to it alone… In the water of the spring dwells the marriage of sky and earth. It stays in the wine given by the fruit of the vine, the fruit in which the earth’s nourishment and the sky’s sun are betrothed to one another. In the gift of water, in the gift of wine, sky and earth dwell. But the gift of the outpouring is what makes the jug a jug. In the jugness of the jug, sky and earth dwell.53

Heidegger’s interpretive redeployment of Laozi’s empty vessel in the context of “sky and earth” evokes while modifying the Chinese conception of heaven and earth (tiandi ໽ഄ). Sky and earth, along with mortals and immortals, form what Heidegger called the “fourfold” (Geviert). It is a poetic description of reality that differentiates a finite mortal existence within the broader openness of the

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world from the uniquely modern destruction and loss of such openness in the forgetting of being and the leveling of beings, including the human being, into objects of technical mastery. Heidegger portrayed his own thought as a thinking of paths and ways illustrated by images of contemplative country paths and winding forest ways. As such, Heidegger’s way (Weg) has been associated with the dao and he himself addressed the word dao in a number of passages. Heidegger mentioned the untranslatability of “basic words” such as logos and dao. He also ventured to say more about “way” and dao, as an originary or world-disclosing word, in Underway to Language: Perhaps the word “way” is a primordial word of language that speaks to human reflection. The leading word in the poetic thinking of Laozi is dao that “properly” signifies way. But because one easily thinks of “way” only externally, as a stretch linking two places, our word “way” has too hastily been found inappropriate to name what dao says. One therefore translates dao as reason, spirit, raison, sense, logos.54

Heidegger continued this passage by reflecting on whether dao, as a primordial disclosive word that usually and for the most part lies concealed in its unsaid, might be—to adopt an expression from his early thought—formally indicative; that is, a way that potentially points toward the plurality of ways: However, dao could be the way that moves all ways, the very source of our ability to think what reason, spirit, sense, logos properly, that is, from their own essence, would like to say. Perhaps the secret of all secrets of thoughtful saying conceals itself in the word “way,” dao, if we let these names return into their unsaid, and are capable of this letting… All is way.55

Technique and the Dao A number of moments in Heidegger’s works that have been associated with Lao-Zhuang Daoism in the rich and diverse secondary literature on Heidegger and East Asian philosophy—such as the letting releasement of things in poetic dwelling in contrast with the technological domination of things as mere objects of use and the uselessness that places conventional conceptions of instrumental usefulness and purposiveness into question—have their counterparts in Buber’s early humanistic and personalistic interpretation of Zhuangzi as a poet of the liberation of humans and things in response to what is needful in existence and

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its healing power. In an analogous way, Heidegger’s identification of technology with the essence of modern Western civilization, which he interpreted as the culmination of the unique metaphysical history of being in the West, has an analogue in Buber’s own critique of modern technological society and the ongoing depersonalization of human life. The modernistic dehumanizing objectification occurs for Buber through the illegitimate overextension of the impersonal I-it relationship. It has reduced even the sense of community and social hope to technical planning: Under the influence of pantechnical trends Utopia too has become wholly technical; conscious human will, its foundation hitherto, is now understood as technics, and society like Nature is to be mastered by technological calculation and construction.56

A significant difference remains between Buber and Heidegger. While Heidegger drew on the more abstract quasi-metaphysical imagery of empty vessels and empty spokes from the Daodejing and the uselessness of the useful from the Zhuangzi, the early Buber embraced the Zhuangzi’s bestiary of animals and the concrete images of natural phenomena. While Heidegger posited an “abyss” separating the human and the animal, there is a continuity, mutuality, and reversibility of the human and the animal in the stories and parables of Zhuangzi and Buber. Here the human can be perceived, suddenly and unexpectedly, from a non-human perspective in order to illumine what is genuine in life. In narratives of talking trees and animals, metaphor and parable are more primary in teaching the truthful life than the cognitive or theoretically formulated principles demanded by the modern scientific and technological worldview. As one of Buber’s Berlin teachers Wilhelm Dilthey stressed, poetic language is more expressive, evocative, and transformative of the fundamental moods and dispositions of life than metaphysical systems or theoretical discourses. Buber’s language of the needful, of the poetic, and the priority of the noncognitive teaching of the way that realizes transformational transcendence in the midst of the immanence of everyday life indicates a way of contextualizing and complicating readings of the role of Daoist wuwei and ziran 㞾✊ in Heidegger’s writings. Heidegger noted in the Letter on Humanism that: “We are still far from pondering the essence of action decisively enough.”57 Against the activism and the striving and struggling of the conatus, subject, and will to power of the Western metaphysical tradition, Heidegger calls for the “essence of action” to be thought from the dimension of letting releasement (Gelassenheit)

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and powerlessness (Unmacht) that resonates with and is in part informed by Heidegger’s acquaintance and fascination with the texts of Laozi and Zhuangzi. Such letting-be (lassen) and releasing into the openness of being serves as the basis of Heidegger’s response to technological modernity that he identified with the enframing (Ge-stell) of things into “ob-jects.” Enframing is the narrowing of the world to one impoverished world-picture or perspective. It systematically establishes and reproduces the calculability, producibility, and ordering (Machen-schaft) of things as it coercively and reductively transforms things into mere objects of standing reserve (Be-stand) or bare “resources.” Even the human becomes another standing resource, “human resources,” to be exploited among others. What then is the significance of the Zhuangzi and of Buber and Heidegger’s interpretation of Lao-Zhuang Daoism for addressing our current condition and plight; that is, the condition of modernity and the preeminence of science and technology that for Buber and Heidegger—in varying degrees—has resulted in the increasing calculative organization and impersonal neutralization of reality and human life? There are five conclusions that should be made at this point. First, there is the problematization of conventional notions of utility, usefulness, and “purposiveness” in the Zhuangzi. The reversal of perspective that throws the dominant conception of the useful and purposeful into question became a crucial point in the German philosophical reception of Zhuangzi. The historical processes of global exchange of goods, texts, and ideas interculturally and intertextually linked an obscure ancient Chinese text with modern life-philosophical and existential tendencies in German philosophy that continue to resonate in contemporary accounts that construe Zhuangzi as an irrationalist, a primordial naturalist, or a countercultural dissident against the disciplinary mechanisms of conventional social life. Second, it is the skeptical questioning seen in the Zhuangzi as well as its emancipatory poetic and spiritual character that offered European thinkers such as Buber and Heidegger hints at an appropriate response to the crisis of modernity. European philosophy and literature since the nineteenth-century has been concerned with the loss of meaning and purpose that is assumed to be characteristic of modernity. The German sociologist Max Weber defined modernity as the “disenchantment of the world” and universalization of formal and instrumental means-oriented rationality and abandonment of ends- and content-oriented rationality in which the calculation of means “no longer need to be justified by any ends.”58 The narrowed conception and experience of rationality in modernity has been linked with the dominance of technological rationality that reduces all ends

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to means and reduces the myriad things into objects of use and exploitation. Buber and Heidegger perceived a “poetic spirituality” resistant to reductive purposiveness in the Zhuangzi in contrast to the calculative exploitation of things in increasingly globalized modernity. Buber in particular focuses on its useless trees and disfigured bodies that reverse the conventional understanding of the useful and the useless. The Zhuangzi accordingly became part of Buber’s and Heidegger’s critical encounter and confrontation with modernity and its determination by technology, science, and its instrumental calculative rationality, and thus the history of twentieth-century German and Western philosophy. Third, the Zhuangzi provided these two German philosophers with a model of aesthetic and spiritual freedom that did not signify a return to a dogmatic religiosity or monistic mysticism, which they each rejected in their own ways. This issue of mysticism will be examined further in Chapters 7 and 8 in relation to Zen Buddhism. The Zhuangzi instead is conceived as a poetic way of opening up the world in order to dwell immanently and playfully in the world. This free and easy wandering with the myriad things promises to liberate and release one’s own self and things, allowing each to be itself as it is, in contrast with a modern European culture that produced the egotistical domination of things in the name of a freedom and happiness of an isolated atomistic individual self. Two additional points should be made about the Zhuangzi in the context of the philosophies of Buber and Heidegger. Fourth, in the case of Buber, the Zhuangzi text indicates a dialogical and communicatively mediated spirituality to be distinguished from the monistic, elemental, and anti-linguistic incarnation of the teaching that the early Buber associated with the figure of Laozi. By philosophizing through images, similes, and parables, Zhuangzi related the teaching of the dao back to ordinary life in a way that parallels the Hasidic story tellers of Eastern Europe. Interestingly, Buber would interpret Heidegger’s way of thinking as being closer to the monistic spirit of Laozi than the dialogical ethos of Zhuangzi in this sense. Buber critiqued Heidegger in a text from 1938 as a monist deifying a stern inhuman silence and an isolated solitude that results in a formalized “solicitude” (Fürsorge) lacking a genuine Thou (Du) and concrete singular other.59 There can be no genuine encounter or dialogue with the other in Heidegger. Buber’s depiction of the questionability of concealment, darkness, and silence in Laozi in 1910 and Heidegger in 1938 is, as if in response, placed in question in Heidegger’s remark from 1957: Laozi says, “Whoever knows its brightness, cloaks himself in its darkness.” We add to this the truth that everyone knows, but few realize: Mortal thinking must let itself down into the dark depths of the well if it is to see the stars by day.60

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Fifth, in Buber’s portrayals of examples and models drawn from Daoist and Hasidic sources, the poetic affective word has priority over the cognitive proposition in authentic teaching. This elucidation of the priority of the affective in human life is evident in Heidegger’s articulation of the dominance of the affective dimension of human existence in the mood and attunement of beinghere (that is, the Stimmung of Dasein). Buber is without doubt more temperate in his assessment of modernity than can be said of Heidegger. The priority of the affective in Buber leads to contextualizing and situating rationality while warning against the dangers of abandoning reason. Buber’s approach does not entail the radical critique and rejection of science, technology, and the neutralizing objectifying perspective that these presuppose. Heidegger’s radicalism is an extreme danger that Buber perceived in his way of thinking. Buber maintains that the priority of the personal means to revive the human in its current plight while not fleeing from the machine by situating reason, science, and technology (and the impersonal perspective of the “it”) in the wider dialogical and interpersonal contexts of: (1) the basic world-disclosing and orienting encounter between the I and the thou (ich und Du , the German language capitalizes the “you” rather than the “I”) and (2) human life through the free use of the imagination in stories, parables, and wonders. This task is one that Buber attempted in his edition and interpretation of the Zhuangzi.

Conclusion The path-breaking yet underappreciated German philosopher and sociologist Helmuth Plessner maintained in his essay “Utopia in the Machine,” published in 1924, that we cannot escape the machine and the artificial to return to a radical or pure condition of naturalness: Escaping from machines and returning to the fields is not possible. They do not release us and we do not release them. With a mysterious power machines are inside us and we are inside them. We have to follow their law until they themselves show us … the limits of the domination of nature.61

Plessner’s posing of the issue of technology, along with other Weimar-era intellectuals such as Oswald Spengler’s account connecting modern technology and Western civilization with the eye and German culture with the hand, informed how twentieth-century German thinkers from the right to the left

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of the political spectrum responded to the question concerning technology. Buber and Heidegger would not seek to resolve the problem of technological modernity by returning to a bare nature free of the artificial and the human; rather they turned to alternative paths such as (1) the spiritual cultivation of the person through the dynamic transformations of life and interpersonal dialogue (Buber) or (2) the poetic cultivation of the word in response to the needful, i.e., the unnecessary, as a way to release and safeguard the myriad things in a way that is unknown to instrumentalized language and calculative thought (Heidegger). Each thinker draws on and engages with “Daoist” ideas and images, insofar as they understood them, even as they interpreted them in ways that allowed each to pursue their own different philosophical projects. As Reinhard May noted, and as seen in the account given in the present chapter, Heidegger’s reading of Zhuangzi was shaped in a number of ways by Buber’s edition of the Zhuangzi.62 Heidegger shared Buber’s non-cognitivist, theory-skeptical perspective and attention to paradoxical and poetic language. Heidegger’s interpretation of Daoism informed his thinking “to an extent” (albeit an extent that can never satisfy the Eurocentric skeptic committed to the idea of the autonomy of Western philosophy) of a poetic dwelling (wohnen) of mortals and immortals between earth and sky (the fourfold, das Geviert). Such dwelling resists yet cannot overcome technological modernity, which awaits another epoch of being. Such poetic dwelling cannot be reduced to the instrumental calculative thinking and limited purposiveness, which Heidegger associated with modern science and technology, if we mortals are indeed to respond to that which is genuinely needful in human existence and dwell poetically in the midst of things between earth and sky. Nonetheless, the historically interconnected yet existentially divergent interpretations of “Lao-Zhuang Daoism” articulated by Buber and Heidegger entail divergent possibilities for spiritually and poetically responding to modernity and its scientific and technological character.

5

Heidegger, Misch, and the “Origins” of Philosophy

Introduction to philosophy: One or myriad beginnings? Discourses of what should and should not count as philosophy can be contextualized by interpreting them as temporally constituted phenomena, with their own rules of inclusion and exclusion, differing according to socialhistorical circumstances and the openness and closure of the hermeneutical horizon to intercultural encounter and dialogue. Such historically oriented contextualizing approaches to philosophy risk becoming “just so” historical retellings of arbitrary opinions or sociological theories of subjective worldviews and relative social systems of knowledge, which remain external to the immanent and internally motivating questions of the validity and truth of the thought that are independent of the factical biographical thinker and the idea’s transitory social-historical conditions. This suspicion of contextualization was raised by Martin Heidegger, in a comment that might seem prescient given his own problematic biography, when he stated in a 1924 lecture course on Aristotle that it is sufficient biographical information about the philosopher to state that he lived and thought: “Regarding the personality of a philosopher, our only interest is that he was born at a certain time, that he worked, and that he died.”1 The philosopher’s biography and the empirical historical conditions of the philosopher’s life cannot illuminate but rather obscure and displace the more originary historicity of philosophical questioning in which thinking thinks the thinker and language speaks the speaker. Heidegger and his student Hans-Georg Gadamer continue to be at the center of standard accounts of the character, tasks, and scope of hermeneutics as a philosophical instead of a philological enterprise. Heidegger in the 1920s and Gadamer in Truth and Method were motivated to critically redefine and rethink hermeneutics against its earlier nineteenth-century incarnations in

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Schleiermacher and Dilthey. In particular, the internal moment of philosophical truth as the disclosure of world and language is intended to overcome the socialscientific, context- and biographical-oriented study of philosophy associated with Dilthey and his learned studies in modern European intellectual and cultural biography and history. Dilthey and Misch, who as noted in Chapter 1 wrote the pioneering History of Autobiography that included Arabic, Chinese, and “non-Western” sources, emphasized the unique personal adaptation to and configuration of natural and social-historical forces in the living and cultivation (Bildung) of a concrete individual life. In this immanent and personalist species of life-philosophy (Lebensphilosophie), the conception of life encompasses more than the general physical, organic, and historical features of life shared by each and all; it is more fundamentally an indication of a life in its singularity. It is here in the conditional and contingent circumstances of a life—forming a singular life-context or nexus (Lebenszusammenhang)—that self-reflection and philosophizing in doubt and wonder commence and unfold in contrast to the vision of a beginning originating in a primordial experience of being or truth detached from individual and social-historical life in its conditional and ontic facticity. Hermeneutics cannot be detached from the interpersonal relation in Dilthey and Misch, as it is defined as the art of interpersonal understanding and interpretation that proceeds toward others through their behaviors, expressions, objectifications, and monuments. The interpretive art has been cultivated in multiple ways in various cultural situations. The cultivation of hermeneutics outside the West encompasses—Misch notes—the Chinese Confucian literati traditions.2 The disagreement between a contextualizing intersubjective and an ontological hermeneutics has a number of implications for the question: What is philosophy? In both cases, the response to the question of what is and is not considered to be philosophy is articulated in relation to an understanding of interpretation itself and the philosophy of history. Philosophy as the history of truth interpreted as unconcealment and disclosure, as the metaphysical concealment and displacement of its first Greek beginning, can uniquely originate in archaic Pre-Socratic Greece. Philosophy as the fateful destining of being culminates in the current impoverishment and plight of being, in the homelessness and disenchantment of modern technological Western civilization. The East and the South only derivatively participate in Heidegger’s history of being to the extent that they are increasingly assimilated through the planetary advance of the technological worldpicture—and its destructive reduction of beings to instrumental calculation— which originates in the Greek experience of nature as physis (φύσις).3

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Part One: Questionable Origins Heidegger, history, and the question of the origin In the context of post-Kantian German philosophy, the question of whether there can be a Chinese, Indian, or African philosophy is determined by the interpretation of philosophy’s history as more than a fortuitous contingent process or collection of historiographical facts. In his early thought of the 1920s, Heidegger unfolded a distinction developed in the correspondence and writings of Dilthey and Count Yorck von Wartenburg. History as the facts and explanations of historiography (Historie) is contrasted with lived experiential history as occurrence and event (Geschichte).4 While Historie concerns the external reconstruction of contingently related phenomena, Geschichte points toward the temporal and historical occurrence of human existence as Dasein (“being here”). Dilthey described Geschichte through the first-person participant perspective of individuals as the living experience (Erlebnis), expression (Ausdruck), and interpretive understanding (Verstehen). Geschichte becomes the ontological event of being in Heidegger, to speak schematically here, who confronted the conventional everyday and historiographical understandings of history with the facticity of history as an enactment (Vollzug) and as event (Ereignis) of being. The living sense of one’s own historicity needs to be interpreted ontologically rather than ontically (e.g., biographically, historiographically, and psychologically) for Heidegger. The disclosive event of being is presupposed yet not directly understood in the first-person participant perspective. It requires a critical destructive confrontation (Auseinandersetzung) with the sedimentations of ordinary life and the metaphysical tradition of the forgetting of being to be encountered and properly thought as a question. It is the destructuring, deconstructive dimension of Heidegger’s project that binds philosophy to confronting and recollecting its Greek origin. The dismantling, which is called “destruction” (Destruktion) in German in Being and Time, of the history of metaphysics motivates Heidegger’s readings of historical Western philosophers and pushes the inquirer back into the question of the origin of philosophy. It is in the wonder of the origin that the thinker rediscovers more than the conditional and transient ontic beginnings of philosophy much less the ontic existence of early philosophers. In this situation of dismantling the historical transmission in order to confront its originary source (Ursprung) anew, and thus reawaken the radicalness of the origin, any

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empirical ontic starting point (Beginn) of thought—which can happen anywhere and anytime—is distinguished from philosophy’s primordial ontological origin and destiny.

Heidegger and the Occidental essence of philosophy Heidegger has been a widely used and yet abused inspiration and source for comparative philosophy.5 Unlike most twentieth-century philosophers, Heidegger had a continuing interest in Asian forms of thinking since the 1920s when he read aloud from the Zhuangzi 㥞ᄤ at social gatherings. Heidegger repeatedly incorporated images and phrases from translations of Daoist and, less frequently, Zen Buddhist texts. He is particularly concerned in these instances with the Daoist discourse of emptiness and the word “dao” 䘧 itself as the fundamental concept and guiding word of Chinese thinking. As explored in Chapter 4, Heidegger found an affinity between Zhuangzi’s free and easy wandering (xiaoyao you 䗡䘭䘞) in the dao and his thinking that he described as a way (Weg) and a “being underway” (Unterwegssein) without a predetermined goal or destination. Heidegger is often described as enthusiastically discussing Asian poetry and thinking with Asian students and visitors, even attempting to co-translate the Daodejing 䘧ᖋ㍧ with Paul Shih-yi Hsiao (Xiao Shiyi 㭁᏿ ↙) in the mid-1940s. Heidegger’s actual dialogues with Chinese and Japanese students and visitors are taken up in several writings.6 Notwithstanding Heidegger’s active interest and the vast literature in the West and the East deploying Heidegger’s concepts and strategies to interpret Asian texts and figures, this attention should not be conflated with an endorsement of Asian thinking as philosophical. On the contrary, Heidegger consistently and explicitly opposed the possibility of a Chinese or other forms of non-Western— that is to say a non-Greek—philosophy. In a typical utterance, for instance, Heidegger claimed that: “The style of all Western-European philosophy—and there is no other, neither a Chinese nor an Indian philosophy—is determined by this duality ‘beings—in being.’”7 For Heidegger, insisting on the Greek origin and exclusively European essence (Wesen) of philosophy, “the West and Europe, and only these, are, in the innermost course of their history, originally ‘philosophical.’”8 Heidegger contended that the peoples of “ancient India, China, and Japan” are not “thought-less” though this thought cannot be thinking “as such.”9 The thoughts of the East are not determined by the Greek conception of logos (λόγος) and its fate that characterizes what Heidegger calls “thinking

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‘as such’” and “our Western thinking.”10 Heidegger’s destructuring confrontation with the logos-orientation of Occidental philosophy remains bound up with its historical conceptualization as essentially and necessarily Western, as do the later critiques of Western logocentrism unfolded in the works of Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty.11 The immanent radical critique of the history of Western philosophy can end up serving as a means for preserving its prioritization and the neglect of philosophy’s non-Western possibilities. In Heidegger’s worst and more sinister moments in the 1930s, associated with his involvement with National Socialism, the original Greek origin of philosophy and the evening land (Abendland) and its repetition are identified with what he describes in a text from 1934 as a “decision against the Asiatic.”12 Decision, as expressed in the German word Entscheidung, means a crucial transformative cutting apart and separation of the Greek-Germanic vis-à-vis the Asiatic world. The image of a Greek confrontation with and overcoming of Asiatic hordes reoccurs throughout his lecture courses and writings on early Greek philosophy and the German poet Hölderlin, who—according to Heidegger in 1934/35— creatively surpassed “the Asiatic representation of destiny” as the Greeks originally and singularly—evoking Hegel’s distinction between Greek freedom and Oriental servitude—overcame “Asiatic fate.”13 Prefiguring Germany’s present task, Heidegger envisions the “Greeks” as only becoming a people (Volk) by creatively confronting and differentiating themselves from what was “most foreign and most difficult to them—the Asiatic.”14 Employing the characteristic decisionist and voluntarist language of his thinking during the early National Socialist period, Heidegger portrays how a people—namely, this German people—must choose its essence to distinguish it from other peoples so that it can be itself and not be overwhelmed by the foreign. In 1936, when he already began to distance himself from National Socialism, Heidegger spoke of the need for the “preservation of the European peoples from the Asian,” playing the geopolitical game of an alien and foreign Asiatic threat menacing and overwhelming the European world and thereby vindicating National Socialist politics.15 We should note that Heidegger’s former teacher Edmund Husserl can be said to celebrate the unique achievements of Occidental civilization in his writings on history and science during this period, as Derrida argued and which will be examined in greater detail in Chapter 6, yet Husserl’s situation is fundamentally dissimilar, as he interprets the basic tendencies of Western culture to be ethical and rational and directs them against the irrationalism and authoritarianism characteristic of the geopolitical situation in the 1930s, and which Heidegger embraced.

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Heidegger’s provocative and fearful language concerning the menacing and uncanny presence of the “Asiatic” is primarily applied to Soviet communism from the 1930s into the Second World War. However, Heidegger would still oppose the “Asiatic,” as the primary antagonist of the Greek, in the 1960s, contrasting its looming threatening and uncanny “darkness” with the Greeks capacity to reorder it through the imposition of order, measure, and light: “The Asiatic element once brought to the Greeks a dark fire, a flame that their [i.e., Greek] poetry and thought reorder with light and measure.”16 Although this could be construed as the generous gift of heavenly flame, the fire of heaven of the Greeks inspiring the native poet of which Hölderlin speaks, the statement is problematic given Heidegger’s association of the Asiatic with the irrational and the emphasis on reordering and illuminating rather than guarding this “dark fire.”17 Despite the totalizing and destructive character of Western technological modernity, it is only the confrontation with the Western origin of philosophy that grants a release. It is often mentioned that Heidegger praised Zen Buddhism at times. But he warned in the 1966 Spiegel interview “Only a God can save us” of “any takeover (Übernahme) of Zen Buddhism or any other Eastern experiences of the world (Welterfahrungen).” Whatever affinities Heidegger noted between his conception of way and a non-coercive “letting releasement” (Gelassenheit) with Chinese wuwei ⛵⚎ and Daoist and Zen Buddhist expressions of letting and responsiveness, Heidegger reasserted in this interview that the question of philosophy is necessarily an internal European one: the needed shift in thinking (Umdenken) is only possible through a new appropriation of the European tradition through a confrontation with its origin.18 The crisis of European philosophy and culture that characterizes modernity can be countered only through a return to and emancipating confrontation with the Greek origin that fundamentally determines it. The question of philosophy is consequently and persistently a question of the Greek-German (in the 1930s and early 1940s) and, after the end of the Second World War, of the European and Western confrontation with the history of metaphysics from its initial Greek origins to its unfolding in the modern technological world-picture. In Heidegger’s account, globalization, and consequently also the emergence of phenomena such as global and “world” philosophy, would only be a further realization of the enframed and reified world of Western modernity that precludes intercultural encounter and dialogue.

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On the prejudices of the philosophers One preconception of modern Western philosophy, one shared by Heidegger when he valorizes Asian discourses as forms of unphilosophical “poetic thinking,” which echoes in its contemporary incarnations is the assumption that argument, conceptualization, and rationality do not occur in non-Western intellectual lineages in an appropriately philosophical way. Asian philosophies have been categorized as folk, mystical, mythical, and poetic wisdom traditions lacking argumentation and what Hegel called the “labor of the concept” (“Arbeit des Begriffes”).19 The distinction between non-conceptual and conceptual cognition, and the particularity of non-Western forms of thought and the universality and infinity of Western philosophy, was deployed by Hegel and the subsequent tradition to demarcate and subjugate non-Western discourses to the master discourse of Western philosophy. The historical account of the developmental unity of European philosophy from the archaic Greeks to the technological moderns is a common dominant trope of much European philosophy. From Herder and Hegel through Heidegger to Derrida and Rorty, only that which stands in an internal historical relation to philosophy’s Greek origins is considered philosophy in contrast with other forms of thought and reflection. It is notable that this essentially Hegelian narrative, which we traced in Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption in Chapter 1, continues to shape the approaches of those thinkers claiming to explicitly oppose the totalizing nature of Hegel’s philosophy of history as the developmental and teleological unfolding of spirit toward its absolute realization. Heidegger not only problematized the modernity that is the culmination of Hegel’s narrative, he also questioned the height of classical Greek civilization for the sake of what it purportedly conceals: the experience of being as physis, as upsurge and holding sway into the openness of being. The “other beginning” (der andere Anfang) that Heidegger began to articulate in the 1930s does not occur through imitating the first Greek beginning (der erste Anfang), but rather by confronting it, exposing all that is questionable and uncanny (unheimlich) in it. Heidegger’s division of the philosophy of the evening land (Abendland) of the West and the non-philosophical mythic and poetic thinking of the morning land (Morgenland) of the East presupposes his destructuring of metaphysical thinking underway to its origin. The other beginning is suggestive in that it has been construed in overly charitable readings as indicating beginnings outside of

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Greece.20 Nonetheless, although there are other kinds of other beginnings outside the West, these cannot be beginnings of and for philosophy. It cannot essentially constitute “another beginning” for Heidegger if it is not a Western differentiating confrontation (Auseinandersetzung) with its own first Greek beginning. The Eurocentric paradigm defining the present scope of philosophy depends on a particular conception of history and consequently can sound odd to nonphilosophers while remaining academic philosophy’s dominant paradigm. This Eurocentric model, challenged in the work of Misch, has had significant implications for contemporary thought as it operates as the basis of claims of Derrida and Rorty that there is no philosophy outside of the West.21 Heidegger’s strategy is revised and radicalized in Derrida’s and Rorty’s deconstructive unweaving on the tradition of Western metaphysics that indirectly and in the last analysis preserve the primacy and privilege of the Western essence of philosophy. In contrast to the singular-plural “dialogue of peoples” articulated by thinkers such as Georg Misch, Helmuth Plessner, and Martin Buber, even the discourse of the competition between Athens and Jerusalem—as representing Greek philosophy and its Jewish other—in Rosenzweig, Levinas, and the later Derrida remains too restrictive insofar as it is closed to Qufu ᳆䯰, identified as the birthplace of Confucius, or that which is exterior to this dyadic dynamic that defines Western ontotheology.22

Part Two: Other Beginnings Another “another beginning”? I would like to propose here that there is another “another beginning” in thinking about the origin of philosophy. In the hermeneutical life-philosophy of Dilthey and Misch, philosophy cannot have one unique primordial starting point that defines a closed lineage from antiquity to modernity. It has multiple temporal beginnings as do all sciences, life-attitudes, and worldviews. There is no one origin insofar as they are born of various provenances and inevitably mediated by personal and social life. In the multiplicity and singularity of human life, in its strivings and conflicts, typical patterns emerge that can serve as heuristic models to begin to approach and interpret individuals and peoples across diverse socialhistorical and hermeneutical situations. The nineteenth-century German historical school, or historicism, had taught the relativity of all forms of life such that one needs to immanently perceive and

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interpret a perspective from the inside in order to understand it. Dilthey contested historicism’s radical perspectivalism and relativism by developing notions of structure and pattern as well as the anthropological dimension of human existence. The dynamic social, psychological, and anthropological structures of human life are relational and positional rather than defined by an underlying essence or constant identity. The human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) investigate these common formations and their individuation in myriad ways in the lives of individuals and peoples. Such structured formations limit and limit to the incommensurability of forms of life and language games. It also challenges, as evident in the critical responses of Misch and Plessner to Heidegger and Carl Schmitt, the possibility of a pure historicity and existential decisionism that denies any natural and anthropological determinations and limits.23 This alternative hermeneutical strategy is one that Heidegger explicitly rejected. Heidegger critiqued Dilthey’s thesis of the plural ontic origins of philosophy in the name of the unity of the question of being, which can fundamentally only be the one question of philosophy, in his winter semester 1928–1929 lecturecourse Introduction into Philosophy (Einleitung in die Philosophie).24 Heidegger discusses here how one enters into philosophy by already being within it in this work. Heidegger presented, in the context of discussing the nature of philosophizing, his last sustained reflection on Dilthey’s hermeneutical lifephilosophy and indirectly Misch’s interpretation and extension of it. Misch’s role has been little noticed in scholarship about Heidegger despite the fact that, in an interesting footnote in Being and Time, Heidegger mentioned his reliance on Misch’s interpretation of Dilthey.25 In the lecture-courses of the late 1920s and the early 1930s, Heidegger takes up and responds to a number of topics from Misch, including Misch’s work Life-philosophy and Phenomenology (Lebensphilosophie und Phänomenologie) that developed one of the earliest extended critiques of Being and Time.26 Heidegger claimed in Introduction into Philosophy that Dilthey’s worldview thinking is absorbed and lost in the ontic starting points of thought and reflection as if there were any other points of departure but those of ontic life, without recognizing the dignity and unity of the ontological origin. This origin consists in the ontological difference between beings as separate entities (Seiende) and being (Sein) itself. Heidegger concluded that Dilthey leaves us adrift in an endless sea of ontic multiplicity and myriad human scientific and historiographical investigations without a proper relation to the ontological event of history and the primordial origin.27

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Despite the insights Heidegger acknowledged gaining from Dilthey in the 1920s, Dilthey cannot be counted a genuine philosopher for him. He is a human scientist and historiographer investigating the plurality of contingent ontic conditions of ideas and worldviews.28 The philosopher in Heidegger’s estimation must rise or return to a higher vocation in the movement from history as a mere science to history as tracing the event of being. Whatever the other merits or faults of Heidegger’s understanding of history and philosophy, and its impact on contemporary thought through Derrida and Rorty, it articulates the idea of philosophy primarily in a monistic form. This form might be elucidated as an existential a priori that binds the questioner and as a method of discovering the ontological in the ontic. Heidegger described this in the sense of a hermeneutical anticipation or formal indication that abstracts from the particularity of one perspective in order to allow the multiplicity of concrete particulars to be encountered and engaged. The unity of the ontological difference between beings-being, which alone defines philosophy for Heidegger, would consequently permit the plurality of concrete forms of existence and ontic ways of being to be disclosed and recognized. Heidegger’s method of formalization in formal indication and anticipating the way is in a significant sense not formal enough.29 It remains committed to a particular form of experience and bound to an ontological prejudice that marginalizes the ontic empirical particularities that are the plural points of departure for self-reflection (Selbstbesinnung) in the context of a life in all of its texture and singularity. In the context of the hermeneutical life-philosophy of Dilthey and Misch, and in classical Chinese philosophy as evidenced in the onto-generative hermeneutics implicit in the Yijing ᯧ㍧, the point of departure for reflection needs to be the hermeneutical situation of life itself instead of an abstract formalized conceptuality. Such life is a changing and dynamic holistic nexus rather than the static identity of one determinate origin or a determinate systematic totality that would subordinate and totalize all elements.30 Heidegger might well break with the prejudices of abstract theorizing and mathematical vision that limited Husserl’s phenomenology. The ontological prejudice prevents Heidegger, in spite of himself to the extent that he wishes to prepare for a dialogue with Eastern thought, from recognizing philosophy in different settings that do not stem from the Greek origin and do not prioritize or pose the question of being. As Misch and Plessner indicated in the politically charged atmosphere of 1931, Heidegger’s idea of philosophy is intrinsically Eurocentric.31 It addresses the “being-there” of the Indian, the Etruscan, or the Egyptian only insofar as they can adopt themselves to the classical Greek-Christian tradition.32

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Heidegger’s visualization of philosophy is, despite his moments of openness toward Asian thinking to the extent that it is poetic thinking rather than philosophy, transfixed by and beholden to an “ethnocentric a priori,” which still structures contemporary Western philosophical discourses and institutional practices, such as in the guise of “ethnocentric relativism.” Philosophy has been ethnocentric to the extent that its very idea is restrained to a particular—whether racially or culturally conceived—ethnically based historical tradition. It is remarkable that modern and contemporary Western philosophy continues to conceive of itself as a closed universe. Medieval and early modern European thinkers were aware of and in discussion with Jewish, Arabic, and eventually Indian and Chinese sources. While Leibniz and Malebranche assessed elements of Chinese philosophy positively or negatively in relation to Christianity, a discourse that was not exclusively European or Western for them, philosophers since Herder and Hegel have excluded Chinese philosophy as incommensurable with Western philosophy. Even after the end of explicit developmental teleological philosophies of history that conclude with the triumphant culmination of Greek logos in modern Western thought, this ethnocentric a priori remains operative in Western philosophy’s self-deconstructive and immanent internal critics.

Georg Misch and the multiplicity of origins One hermeneutical tendency understands interpretation as proceeding from the self to the other as it extends itself into the world, expanding the circles of its horizons, and eventually returning to itself in self-understanding. Another interpretive tendency finds the self confronted with misunderstandings, obstacles, and resistances that cannot be overcome and integrated into the presence and mastery of the self. Such encounters with alterity and difference lead the interpreter to recognize the irrevocable multiplicity, particularity, and perspectivality of things. For Misch, as for Dilthey earlier, intercultural interpretation enacts the model of all interpretation as an oscillation between the typical and the unique, the general and the singular: what appears alien and other is initially approached through the typical at the same time as the typical is reformulated through the experience of, reflection on, and responsiveness to what is singular.33 There is consequently no radical abyss between interpretation and intercultural interpretation, which faces the same challenges of the ineffability of radical alterity and that which is singular and unique.

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Furthermore, an alternative conception of history allowed Misch to recognize the multiple beginnings of self-reflection across different cultures and epochs. The beginning of philosophy, according to Misch in his 1926 work Der Weg in die Philosophie (The Way into Philosophy), is not the self-certainty or self-presence of the origin to itself.34 Philosophy did not begin only once in Greece, it occurs as a unitary phenomenon in the ruptures of ordinary experience that provoke a reflective questioning and reconsideration of experience and one’s situation.35 Philosophy is an internal break with immediacy and entrance into selfreflection, which has no necessary or one culturally specific origin (Ursprung). Philosophy, according to Misch, is not bound to one particular form or one given question; in the breakthrough or cutting through (Durchbruch), “it strikes us like a message from another world.”36 This assumption is both born within the European philosophical tradition, the initial horizon of Misch’s hermeneutical point of departure, and looks beyond the boundaries of this horizon.37 Misch’s account breaks through the limits of the enthnocentric a priori. The very first illustration Misch provided for such a beginning of philosophy, the transition from one particular horizon to another horizon that characterizes the philosophical breakthrough, is the story of “Autumn Floods” (Qiushui ⾟∈) in the Zhuangzi.38 The great river believes itself to be greater than the small tributaries and channels that lead into it until it encounters the great sea. In this encounter, the ordinary self-conception is placed in question as a one-sided, partial, and limited perspective in relation to another perspective. In Misch’s description of this Zhuangzian narrative, the limited and partial is confronted with the expansive. There is a breakthrough out of the everyday natural attitude of ordinary conventional life to reflection on that life. Life-reflections proceed through the “categories of life” or what his Göttingen colleague Plessner called “the material a priori.”39 The narrative from the Zhuangzi permits Misch to contest the ordinary onesided and limited conception of life and the relation of philosophy to it. The shifting multi-perspectivalism of Misch’s hermeneutical life-philosophy allows the play of perspectives in the Zhuangzi to come forth not only as a merely alien form of thought or poetic thinking but as a specific form of philosophical reflection in response to a question, which in its structural affinities, addresses the human condition. In Misch’s second chapter on “breaking through,” which was discussed previously in the discussion of Misch in Chapter 1, the other beginnings of philosophy are located across divergent social-historical points inside and outside of Greece: for instance, in the Buddha’s experience of the fundamental

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reality of suffering, in Spinoza’s articulation of ethical decision and moral personality from the reality of the whole, and in Plato’s Socrates proceeding from the limited and qualified to the good as such in the allegory of the cave. As if preemptively responding to Heidegger’s subsequent critique, Misch argued that all four examples are: not the primordial utterances of philosophy; they were rather revivals and recollections of an original knowledge which is anterior to them both logically and historically. And the echo they awoke in us may just be something that the natural course of human life awakes in every human, quite spontaneously, at one time or another.40

Philosophy begins in need, specifically what Misch described as a “metaphysical need” and in the cultivation and expression of a feeling of life: this need is echoed in manifest ways that hearken to the origins of self-reflection in the midst of ordinary life. Exemplary reflective-philosophical moments such as Zhuangzi’s autumn floods indicate and repeat in their own manner the reflective break with the natural customary and unreflective attitude. Misch identifies this break with the genuine beginning and way of philosophy. Misch’s multiplicity of ontic-existential-reflective beginnings of philosophy cannot count as genuine origins of philosophy for Heidegger. He remained beholden by the bewitchment of the ethnocentric a priori, as much as Hegel was, and a commitment to the assumption that there can be only one origin and one historical transmission and lineage of philosophy, which does not include its Arabic and Middle Eastern history. Hegel claimed that “we” modern educated interpreters of world history can only begin to feel at home in history with Greece, since only here do we arrive at the origins of spirit.41 While Hegel—unlike many of his successors—did in fact use the word philosophy in non-Western contexts, he also explicitly stated that “genuine philosophy” arose only in the Occident with its freedom of “individual self‐awareness” that he considered to be in principle contrary to the servitude of “Oriental spirit.”42 There are, according to Heidegger, a “few other great beginnings” that have been construed as the beginnings of other forms of philosophy, a topic which will be discussed more fully in Chapter 6. The referents of this phrase are unclear, and might only refer to the beginnings of poetry and the state as in “The Origin of the Work of Art.” Even though this passage referred to non-Western beginnings, and probably the beginnings of intellectual discourses in India and China, they cannot signify beginnings of Indian and Chinese philosophy. Heidegger stated repeatedly from the 1930s through the 1960s that these do

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not exist and philosophy has one beginning alone: its first (Greek) and its other (Greek-confronting) beginning. There is an essential difference in kind between the people with philosophy and the multiplicity of peoples who lack that history or only participate in it in a secondary manner through globalization. The historical closure of such lineage thinking relies on a teleological conception of history. It contravenes the openness of questioning, thinking, and the happening of philosophy through the question that places oneself in question that Heidegger describes elsewhere—and more satisfactorily in liberating it from one determinate lineage—in Introduction into Philosophy as the essence of philosophizing. Misch’s nuanced approach to the multiplicity of origins is more appropriate and adequate for an intercultural hermeneutics and philosophy confronted with reifications of universalism and particularism. It does not require presupposing the enframed vision of one unitary world feared by anti-intercultural and antiglobalist readers of Heidegger, who conflate the intercultural and the global and resist what they perceive to be a reified universal identity by reifying a particular identity. Misch refused to identify the unity and necessity of philosophy with one unique and necessary historical experience of individual freedom in classical Greece (Hegel) or with an originary experience of being in the early Pre-Socratic philosophers of archaic Greece (Heidegger). To return to an important passage, previously discussed in Chapter 1, Misch claimed: The assumption that Greek-born philosophy was the “natural” one, that the European way of philosophizing was the logically necessary way, betrayed that sort of self-confidence which comes from narrowness of vision. The assumption falls to the ground directly [when] you look beyond the confines of Europe. The Chinese beginning of philosophy, connected with the name of Confucius, was primarily concerned with those very matters which according to the traditional European formula were only included in philosophy as a result of the reorientation effected by Socrates, namely, life within the human, social, and historical world. The task of the early Confucians was to achieve a rational foundation for morality which should assure humans their dignity and provide an ethical attitude in politics.43

In an earlier essay published in 1911, after his return from a journey to India and China, Misch remarked that “the rational gestalt of personality,” which is encountered in and through history, is as much Chinese as it is Greek. “Rational moral personality” is a good discovered in the ancient Chinese Enlightenment movement of Confucianism as well as in the modern European Enlightenment and again in his own ethically oriented life-philosophy.44

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This point is further supported by the ethical-political inspiration Confucian moral-political thought offered to the European Enlightenment, notably in the practical philosophies of Leibniz, Wolff, and Voltaire.45 Reflection and reason are not merely characteristics of Greek or Western humanity, as the classical Greek philosophers themselves knew unlike their modern interpreters. The early Confucian discourse has its own rationality in Misch’s depiction. Misch offers a situated account of rationality that liberates reason from the Eurocentric conception of reason and allows him to perceive how rationality is operative in diverse discourses and forms of life. Integrating rationality and the historical sensibility of concrete ethical life, a sense of ideal norms and practical affairs, reverence for humanity and particular local affective bonds, early Confucianism operates as a primary exemplar of and model for an enlightened “philosophy of life” operating between abstract universality and historical particularity. Misch accordingly portrayed the early Confucian movement as “the supreme example of a movement of thought grounded in life itself.”46 As we saw in Chapter 1, Confucius emerges in Misch’s writings as a figure evoking the immanent ethical and historical enlightenment (Aufklärung) and moral cultivation (Bildung) of life—which is the genuine vocation of philosophy in Misch’s estimation—in contrast to the powers of myth, mysticism, and nature, or, we should add, of being. The Confucian form of rationality disenchants and demystifies, yet it is not therefore purely atheistic according to Misch who is closer to Buber’s interpretation than to Rosenzweig’s. The passages concerning heaven (tian ໽) in the Analects (Lunyu 䂪䁲) reveal background mythic, metaphysical, and cosmological inspirations inherited from earlier Chinese religiosity as well as an ethical and philosophical form of monotheism, which Misch compares to the prioritization of the ethical height of the other person in the Hebrew prophets.47 It is noteworthy that the example of Chinese philosophy interculturally and intertextually became entangled in the early reception of Heidegger’s thinking. Misch would reformulate the point made in the passage quoted above in his 1931 critique of Heidegger Life-philosophy and Phenomenology: the Chinese origins of philosophy do not begin in the enchantment of the question of being and represent a counter-example to Heidegger’s construction of philosophy as exclusively being the thinking of being. The Chinese beginnings of philosophy arise from ethics rather than from ontology. They arise from ethical selfreflection, questions of proper governance and the appropriate way to live, and the anxious care for right action rather than for one’s own death. Using the argument that philosophy is primarily ethical through the exemplary model

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offered by its Confucian form, Misch concludes that Heidegger’s reductive identification of philosophy with the thinking of being one-sidedly constrains and consequently falsifies the idea and practice of philosophy.48 Misch offers a different interpretation of the Greek beginning. He contends that the Greek origin of philosophy received its necessity through the concrete self-reflexive moment of reflection (Besinnung) of life concerning itself. It is as inadvertent and provisional as other origins of self-reflective thinking emerging from the unreflective natural attitudes of ordinary life. Its significance, unity, and necessity arise through the moment of interpretive self-reflection (Selbstbesinnung) in relation to one’s own life-experiences (Lebenserfahrungen). This movement of a hermeneutically situated life understanding and interpreting itself from out of its myriad ontic conditions is what allows the plurality of thought with all of its varied contents of diverse provenance to come into view as a whole: Despite this diversity, however, we can speak of the beginning of philosophy, using both words in the singular. Thus we approach the historical facts on the assumption that philosophy is a unity. This assumption comes from our European tradition; and with our modern view of history, which has learnt to look beyond the bounds of the European horizon, it might seem a mere prejudice. For we meet with a plurality of beginnings and first efforts regarding which one may well enquire whether the one name philosophy should be applied at all. The historical positivism of our time, which everywhere breaks down the universal into the particular, naturally seeks to do the same in respect of philosophy by resolving its ideal unity into a multiplicity of philosophies. And it is true that we do encounter such a multiplicity at the very outset. Nevertheless the historical facts, once their significance is properly understood, reinforce our conviction that philosophy is a unity.49

Ontic multiplicity is not the negation of the essence and dignity of philosophy, as Heidegger accused Misch via his teacher Dilthey in Introduction into Philosophy; it is the arena in which philosophy takes place as an event and enactment not of impersonal being and neutral Dasein—a formal neutrality that is derived “after the fact” of the partiality and perspectivality of historical life—but, following Dilthey’s interpretive individualism, of an individual and personal life.50 Misch extended Dilthey’s immanent and pluralistic personalism, challenging the conceptualization of the person as universally human and yet at the same time oddly particular (exclusively Occidental) that led European thinkers to denigrate non-Western peoples and cultures. This marginalizing perspective is expressed in Hegel’s contention in his philosophy of history that: “World history travels from East to West, for Europe is absolutely the end of world history, Asia the beginning.”51 The

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end of history, as the dynamic realization of free individual consciousness and spirit (Geist) as what guarantees the common life of such subjects, is an ultimately modern Western achievement prefigured in classical Greek culture.52 For Heidegger, in contrast to Hegel, Asia is not even at the borders of the beginning; it is outside of the beginning, as philosophy begins only in Greece. The multifaceted concern with interpreting and cultivating an individual life is not solely a Western one, as Misch persuasively illustrated in his History of Autobiography, as autobiographical and biographical expressions and discourses from direct narrative to deeply personal self-reflection are evident throughout the world.53 Misch does not deny that Western modernity has produced a particular way of experiencing and conceptualizing the person nor does he posit an unchanging underlying “person” independent of the self ’s contextual formation (Bildung). Individual personal life emerges immanently through the formative interpretive practices that address life as a life in the context of the contingency of historical conditions, a multiplicity of intersecting roles, and diverging and conflicting perspectives and worldviews. The universality of philosophy does not appear directly then in the form of a concept, intuition, or originary experience of being in Misch’s works. Universalization can be indirectly achieved through processes of mediation as ideals, norms, and values are formed from the contents of concrete empirical existence. The center arises out of flux and creative formative individuality from Hume’s “bundle of instincts and feelings.”54 The universal emerges from a metaphysical need and urge—born from within immanent life—which motivates the struggle for the clarification, enlightenment, and self-understanding of life in the midst of the particularities of specific hermeneutical situation with its own linguistic, social-historical, and natural-environmental conditions.55 Philosophy happens in the interruption of the ordinary experiencing and thinking of the “natural attitude” and in the distancing that consequently occurs from one’s everyday absorption in one’s circumstances that allows life as a whole to become and be experienced as a question. Philosophy was once born in Greek wonder about physis and cosmos (κόσμος), yet it was not born there alone. Philosophy accordingly cannot be defined as one-determinate-fated destiny that compels to confront one origin. The Chinese beginnings of philosophy have significance for reflection as much as its Greek beginnings. Philosophy is repeatedly reborn anew from a “metaphysical need for transcendence—whether it is expressed in metaphysical, introspective, or ethical language—which pursues routes of self-questioning and reflection rather than the routes of religious mystical experience or of religious authority, devotion, and revelation. Misch

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distinguishes the philosophical from the religious while emphasizing how there are moments of each in the other; for example, the philosophical dimensions of the Jewish Torah or Persian Zoroastrianism. Philosophy, myth, and religion share overlapping origins in human need. One elementary tendency of philosophizing is born from the metaphysical need and urge for transcendence that takes on a reflective form. This urge toward the beyond and a comprehensive metaphysical whole is countered and mediated in its conflict with the tendency toward self-clarification, enlightenment, and critique that is philosophy’s other fundamental tendency. There can be no one origin of philosophy, as philosophy is itself a mediated phenomenon. There is not one unique Greek origin of philosophy in wonder that prioritizes the experience of nature as physis and cosmos, which Misch identifies as a singular experience of nature that prepares the way for the natural sciences. There is in his account the Indian origin that turns the self reflexively inward upon itself to reflectively and meditatively examine the subjectivity and interiority of that self. There is a Chinese origin of philosophy from out of the practical livedexperience (Erlebnis) of the concrete bonds of social life and self-reflection (Selbstbesinnung) on the possibilities of cultivating moral personality within this situational ritually characterized life-context. Misch indicates in a lifephilosophical way here the xing 㸠 character of classical Chinese thought in which knowledge is intrinsically bound up with practice and action. The myriad origins of philosophy cannot persist within themselves as a fated destiny with a “cultural mindset” (such as the reified notion of “Confucian China”) or a determined historical outcome. Developing Dilthey’s conception of peoples, a people cannot be appropriately characterized through an unchanging essence or the collective identity of a substantial “soul of a people” (Volkseele). Following Dilthey’s conception of a socially mediated individualism, and in contrast to Heidegger’s metaphysical collectivist conception of a Volk, a people are generationally and historically constituted through the tensions and affinities of individuals and their diverse desires and interests; that is to say, through the differentiating responses of individuals, and the associations and institutions that they form, to shared questions and tasks and through the irresolvable conflict of worldviews and interpretations that resist totalization into one world-picture. In Misch’s reading of Greek philosophy, there is not one defining essential Greek experience of being as physis. There are multiple divergent and incompatible experiences and conceptualizations of philosophy in ancient and Hellenistic Greece, some of which became more dominant than others during different generations. To speak schematically: while the Pre-Socratics focused

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their gaze on the natural world, Socrates marked a turn toward the ethical question of the self, the Socratic schools focused on issues of moral personality and the good life, and later Neo-Platonism and early Christianity shifted Greek thought toward the experience of the subjective interiority of the self. The existence of multiplicity not only occurs between distinct cultures, as if each culture had one fixed and constant identity and domain of “ownness” (das Eigene) that needs to be retained through all exchanges and interactions with others and other cultures. Multiplicity also occurs within cultures as formational historical realities in Misch’s multi-vocal narrative. Chinese philosophy manifested a mode of expression in the Confucian cultivation of moral personality and concern for the health and vitality of ethical life. It is also expressed Daoist sensibilities about the natural world and subjective self, Mohist (Mojia ๼ᆊ) concerns with equality and fair social organization, and legalist (fajia ⊩ᆊ) conceptions of power, order, and stability. Chinese philosophy, in Misch, ought to be interpreted not so much as a reified monolithic unity, which led European thinkers to one-sidedly praise or condemn a reified image of “China,” but through the affinities, tensions, and disputes between interconnected yet competing and differentiated forms of life and reflection within a given hermeneutical context. Misch can be described as adjusting Dilthey’s thinking of the interpretive encounter and agonistic confrontation between worldviews for the sake of an intercultural art of philosophizing: the intercultural interpreter reflectively and responsively interprets a historical nexus from the typical to the particular in order to articulate its shared structures and the dynamics of their differentiation and conflict. It does this for the sake of that which is singular.

Misch’s trans-perspectival Daoism Misch’s thinking of the tensions between the typical and the unique is still salutary given contemporary discourses that continue to reduce the specificity of a form of lived-experience and reflection to a generic formula whether it is mysticism, skepticism, the perennial philosophy, or the question of being. Because of the specificity of their content and social-historical milieus, texts such as the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi resist being reduced to the abstract formula of Western categories such as mysticism and skepticism, and are often addressed with more nuance and depth in literature than in philosophy.56 Misch claims that early Daoism, which he interprets through the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi, differs as a philosophy focused on the question of the self from

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Greek and Indian conceptions of the subject or self. Misch also distinguishes Daoism from mysticism. Daoism did not achieve the same results as Christian mysticism, or a formulaic definition of mysticism in general, since it cannot break with its own contextual conditions such as the broader formative concern in early China for ethics and politics. Misch is particularly concerned with the tensions between—to employ his vocabulary—the realistic power politics of the “realists” (legalists), the focus on a moral ideal of humanity and social integrity in Confucianism, the idealistic social reformism of Mohism and the multi-perspectivalism, and the emancipatory power of symbolic expression, and free sensibility of life evoked in the Zhuangzi.57 The tensions between these overlapping discourses form a pattern indicating the early Chinese concern for an immanent worldly understanding of life—whether understood naturalistically or culturally—and how to comport oneself and the community within the space between heaven and earth. The counter tendencies in such shared cultural matrices, for instance, of Buddhist non-self (anātman) vis-à-vis Hindu self (ātman) in South Asia, reveal the power of a dominant model in a given form of social-historical life.58 The plurality of feelings of life, perspectives, and arguments constitute a shared pattern constituted through its tensions and distinct responses to common questions that form focal points of this pattern. To this extent, each classical philosophical culture had its prevailing and countervailing tendencies toward understanding and articulating life. But, as one must ask of every “lifephilosophy,” what is life? Life is in this hermeneutical context a structuringstructured nexus with myriad perspectives and possibilities for differentiation and integration, individuation and connectedness, in the hermeneutical Lebensphilosophie of Dilthey and Misch. Life can accordingly be experienced through nature in the sense of physis and cosmos in Greek thought, through the interiority of the subject in classical Indian philosophy, and through social and ethical community in early Chinese philosophy. Notwithstanding Misch’s critical appreciation of Confucius as a figure of socialpolitical enlightenment, it is Zhuangzi who has the first and last hermeneutical life-philosophical word. The “poet-thinker” Zhuangzi is a primary exemplar of philosophizing, as he provocatively challenges, expands, and reverses our perspectives and horizons. Zhuangzi functions a point for interrupting and reorienting the conditional perspective of the philosophers. The stories and paradoxes of Zhuangzi liberate us from our conditional limited perspectives through relativizing them and by immanently locating and articulating life from and in life itself: hiding the world in the world so as not to lose it.59

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Misch’s intercultural hermeneutics can be described as intimating a more radical Zhuangzian perspectival art of interpretation that undoes the fixed identities and essences of ethnocentrism, including its relativistic and liberal forms. The Zhuangzian character of interpretation entails interrupting and going further than Misch’s hermeneutical perspective in interrupting the ethnocentric a priori, revealing through the transformation (hua ࣪) of perspectives and horizons its provincial, conditional, a posteriori character. Accordingly, for us reading Misch reading Zhuangzi, it is a Zhuangzian trans-perspectival strategy that is indicative and most appropriate for our contemporary intercultural hermeneutical situation and for articulating a new intercultural hermeneutics.

Reflecting on another beginning: hermeneutics, the Yijing, and philosophy Along with the Zhuangzi, the Yijing ᯧ㍧offers an additional example of the transformative tendencies of Chinese thinking, indicating another way of reflecting on origins, images, and generation than what has been articulated in the German tradition from Hegel to Heidegger. The already ongoing intercultural encounter and exchange between Western and Chinese philosophy is not merely a one-way street determined by “active” Western and “passive” discourses and intellectual figures. The reflection on hermeneutics and the question of beginnings has been elucidated in response to Heidegger with regard to Chinese philosophy and the Yijing by the Chinese philosopher Chung-ying Cheng ៤Ё 㣅 Cheng’s approach will permit us to place the Chinese discourse of origins in a different light than that offered by either Heidegger or Misch. Cheng has usefully confronted Heidegger’s thinking of origin and beginning in relation to Chinese discourses and emphasized the extent to which “Chinese philosophy is strongly hermeneutical from the very beginning.”60 From this perspective, one can trace the hermeneutical tendencies of Chinese philosophy from its roots in the Zhouyi ਼ᯧ (Changes of Zhou)—the earlier strata of what became the Yijing—through its classical Confucian (rujia ‫ۦ‬ᆊ), Daoist (daojia 䘧ᆊ), Neo-Confucian (xin rujia ᮄ‫ۦ‬ᆊ), and modern Confucian (xiandai xin rujia ⧒ҷᮄ‫ۦ‬ᆊ) developments. The Yijing (Classic of Changes) in particular has operated as a primary orientating point of Chinese philosophizing and hermeneutics. The generative modes of thinking stemming from the Yijing allow in a contemporary intercultural context for the rearticulation of philosophy and its beginning in the context of the spacing between Western and Eastern conceptions of the philosophical domain.61

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The Yijing is not merely a text but an interpretive and reflective practice and art; that is, it indicates a hermeneutical encounter with the happening of the world that is distinct from Western models of “hermeneutics” as the art and theory of interpretation. Based on his limited understanding of the Chinese language and the Yijing, Hegel categorized Chinese thinking as a preconceptual image thinking unable to reach the purity of conceptual thinking, and deprecated Chinese thought as non-conceptual and imagistic. Hegel missed the philosophical character, articulated by Wang Bi ⥟ᔐ and the Yijing’s commentarial tradition, of Chinese reflective uses of the image and its reflections on how concepts incipiently emerge and operate in relation to the dialectically mediated images that are evident in the Yijing.62 Chinese thought, as enacted in the models of the Yijing, is more phenomenologically appropriate to human experience in perceiving how concepts and philosophical reflection have beginnings in images, and emotional and bodily dispositions, while not being limited by these origins to which concepts inevitably return in myriad ways. The Yijing comprises a play of dialectical image-constellations, a changing show of images and perspectives, and it is much more. It is an interpretive practice encompassing and integrating processes of empirical observation, empathetic feeling, and self-reflection in the generation of concrete indicative “images” (xiang 䈵). Such images are indispensable to the practice of the Yijing, and they do not function as mere abstract symbols.63 The transformative play of images—inspired by the traces of heaven, earth, and humanity (tiandiren ໽ഄ Ҏ)—forms prototypical models and dynamic paradigms that can be described as “form-objects” or “process-events.” These image-situations allow interpreters to performatively enact a comprehensive ontological and situationally appropriate understanding of nature, society, and the self through the reflective practice and employment of the trigrams and hexagrams of the Yijing.64 Despite the affinities with Western understandings of hermeneutical philosophy, the onto-generative hermeneutics implicit in the Yijing and its philosophical interpretation differs in crossing and transversing different images and models in which one cannot be claimed to have absolute priority. The Yijing encompasses a multi-perspectivalism that challenges, when they are brought into dialogue, the closed horizons and perspectives of Western philosophy. Such a generative hermeneutics offers to this extent a noteworthy alternative to Western approaches to understanding and interpretation and offers a complex and nuanced way of “divining” and modeling the multifaceted and dynamic relationships between self and world.

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Hermeneutics refers in the Western situation to the art of interpretation and its methodological, theoretical, and philosophical explanation. There is no hermeneutics in the limited sense of a strict discipline or definitive theory of interpretation or interpretive methodology in Chinese intellectual history. However, there are arts of interpretive practice, and there is a preeminently “philosophical hermeneutics” in understanding the dynamic interpretive relational nexus of reality. Both are evident in the creativity expressed in the reception, adaptation, and employment of the Yijing in East Asian discourses and traditions.65 Chinese thinking—in its beginnings in the divinatory, ethical-political, and empirical observational sources of the Zhouyi—does not require a bifurcated division between appearance and reality, the immanent and the transcendent, or mere words and “the word.” Instead, it indicates how the real consists of “the incessant and constant change of all things.”66 This art of thinking does not then separate one image and reify it as a concept or abstract form separated from the dynamic logic of the plural relations of particulars for which the Yijing presents myriad interpretive models that are imaginatively and reflectively employed by its interpreter. One discovers in the singular-plural-indicative hermeneutics of the Yijing multiple indicative models—at least sixty-four and infinitely more— which present variations on the interactive generative character of nature and humanity. Conceptual-imagistic constellations such as benti ᴀ储 (root-body) and yinyang 䱄䱑 indicate both the “origination and embodiment of being and becoming.”67 Benti is not so much a discrete essence or substance in a static or disembodied sense; it is the continuous, integrative process occurring through things and in their generative-hermeneutic interpretation. The bodily oriented onto-cosmology of benti in Chinese discourses points toward the concrete, dynamic, interconnected, and transformative embodiment of the person amid things.68 It suggests therefore an alternative—once it enters into a relation with Western philosophical discourses—to “ontology” as the doctrine of beings and the notion of a fixed ontic/ontological difference as it is (according to the idea of its continuity) articulated in Western philosophy from Parmenides to Heidegger. Chinese and Western hermeneutics cannot be identical to the extent that a different kind of circle is involved in the interpretation of the Yijing than what is evident in either the hermeneutical circle central to the European understanding of hermeneutics or the speculative circle of Hegel’s dialectic. Interpretive understanding can be described as oscillating between experiencing and the experienced, the personal encounter with the world and the objective disclosure

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of the world, and the overlapping interpretive circling of understanding and ontological circling of disclosure. To discuss one example, one manifestation of hermeneutic circling is the ontogenerative image found in Xici 㐿䖁, I:8 and related passages. The ancient sages, it is claimed, “were able to survey all phenomena under heaven and, considering their forms and appearances, creatively and concretely imagined and indicated (xiang) things and their appropriate attributes. These were accordingly called images or ‘forms’ (xiang).”69 The word xiang can mean here: image, symbol, figure, or a pictorial configuration of meaning.70 To form or generate “forms” is called the creative, generative, and originating (qian ђ).71 The word xing ᔶ, which appears in Xici 㐿䖁, I:8 and associated sources, is frequently translated as “appearance.” It also signifies shape, form, figure, or body. In this context, xing can be interpreted not merely as a becoming visible or as the semblance of the real, as an idol or shadow of reality, but as the material manifestation that is the interpretive encounter with reality itself. The reflective empirical investigation of things, which embodies a “concrete rationality” or a logic of embodied universals, stems from the Yijing.72 The observational interpretive character of the Yijing is evident in statements advocating empirically encountering the world by seeing above to observe heaven, seeing below to observe the earth, and witnessing all things.73 The empirically and reflectively generated images of the Yijing situate both self-examination and a reflective observation of the natural world through perception, relational and responsive feeling, and situated mindfulness. The empirical ontic tendency in Chinese thinking was stimulated by and in turn informed observation of and research into astronomical, geographical, and meteorological phenomena, among others. The onto-hermeneutical oscillation or circling movement occurs through natural worldly phenomena and the reflective or interpretive image that is more indicative than symbolizing. This dynamic and vibrant motility is concealed by the language of isolating or atomistic abstract ideas and symbols, as Chinese thinking in this form has upheld the preeminence of the practical and of the good (ethics)—here again revealing its distinctive structure in contrast to Heidegger’s discursive strategies—over impersonal and neutral ontological knowledge. In the context of this generative circling, a situated grasp of the whole as whole is generated through the particularity of phenomena and a situated grasp of the phenomenon as phenomenon occurs through an understanding of the whole as a dynamic interconnected process. The indicative images intimated in the Yijing offer points of inspiration and orientation of the self who observes itself and the

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circumstances in which it participates from the local and the ordinary to the universe and ultimate itself. We should mention at this point the variance between the visible as an arena for a detached and independent observer, who seeks to neutrally contemplate and reconstruct a pre-given reality in art or in ideas, and the visible as an interactive dynamic field for an involved and moved participant in the flow of the generative or embodied constitutive forces of reality. The qualitative experientially rooted participant perspective with its potential for creative renewal becomes evident in forms of Chinese thinking. As Chinese philosophy or art can exist in its otherness from Greek philosophy or art, in a resonance and tension of non-identity without either coercive exclusion or assimilation, Chinese philosophy can be—to think through and take a step beyond Heidegger’s argument—an “other beginning” in confrontation with its “first” Greek beginning.74 As the recently published Black Notebooks (Schwarze Hefte) reveal, Heidegger initially understood this other beginning as a uniquely German one. A different image of beginning occurs in the “Appended Statements” (Xici 㐿䖁), I. 11. It tells of how in the beginning of the universe the supreme ultimate (taiji ໾Ὁ) is both the original element and matter. The Yijing arises with taiji and it is taiji that generates heaven and earth or yin and yang; these generate the four forms or images that in turn generate the eight trigrams (“yiyou taiji, shisheng liangyi, liangyi sheng sixiang, sixiang sheng bagua” ᯧ᳝໾Ὁˈᰃ⫳ ܽ‫⫳۔ܽˈ۔‬ಯ䈵ˈಯ䈵⫳ܿऺ).75 The word is spoken through words. The world appears through the mediating process of images that generatively return the embodied participatory interpreter or observer to taiji, the structuredstructuring whole, through things or phenomena themselves in their own dynamic benti. Such an understanding of human sensibility, feeling, and creative responsiveness has significant consequences for practical life, including how humans interact with their environment and ecological sustainability.76 In the formation of the relation between the “Greek” and the “other” beginning—which when articulated by Heidegger means first and foremost the Germanic and Occidental repetition and renewal of the Greek origin—there is an opening generative space for both boundless reversal and creative and imaginative transversal that is needed in contrast with Heidegger’s confining Greek-German axis. Oriented by the guiding creative thread of the correlational transformational thinking indicated by the reflective enactment and practice of the Yijing, an unconditioned and static distinction between the originary and the non-originary is inadequate to both, as they are themselves changing positions

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in the process of change. Nor can there be an absolute difference between philosophy and non-philosophy, between Western and Chinese thinking, or “East” and “West.” These are relational and positional terms. The encounters between them are not then so much an external futural event to be merely prepared for and anticipated. Despite academic philosophy’s ethnocentric resistance to the very idea of philosophizing happening outside of the West, which it does every day everywhere as Misch and this work have argued, such encounters and exchanges have long been underway—indeed, since the very beginning—and continue to be ongoing.

Conclusion Heidegger’s poetic and anti-modernistic thinking of being has frequently been taken as a resource for intercultural philosophy even as his actual openness to the possibility of a Chinese or other varieties of non-Western philosophy is limited and has been uncritically exaggerated.77 It is correct that Heidegger engaged at times with a few select elements of Asian thought and culture—from Daoism and Zen Buddhism—and adopted them for his own ontological purposes. Still, Heidegger consistently denied that any thinking that does not stem from the lineage of the Greek origin and share in the fateful destiny of Occidental metaphysics culminating in modernity should be properly called philosophy. Heidegger’s argumentation has been decisive for thinkers such as Levinas, Derrida, and Rorty. They contest, reverse, and pluralize Heidegger’s history of being and yet fail to overcome the disavowal of non-Western philosophizing. The understanding of philosophy as proceeding from Greece has been associated with historical thinking, as it is articulated in historically oriented thinkers, particularly Hegel and Heidegger. Does then a commitment to the historicity and specificity of philosophy commit one to it being an essentially Western endeavor? This is not the case in another group of German historical thinkers. Plessner contended that Dilthey, who in numerous ways is an intermediate between Hegel and Heidegger, unlocked new possibilities for thinking and “a new responsibility” by relativizing “the reactive absolutizing of European value systems.”78 The art of interpretively understanding the other described by Dilthey has an ethical and political dimension insofar as it calls for releasing the other by abandoning or challenging power over the other.79 Dilthey and Misch identified multiple origins and lineages of philosophy that emerge and unfold in relation to the feeling, expression, and interpretation of

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life. Heidegger described philosophy as the primordial possibility of  Dasein, of human existence as “thrown” in the world, and yet there is only in the end Occidental philosophy. Philosophy is born of a fundamental mood and attunement in Dilthey, an insight adopted by Heidegger in the 1920s. Dilthey analyzed a broader array of existential moods and dispositions than Heidegger’s focus on anxiety in Being and Time or extreme boredom in “What is Metaphysics?” In Dilthey’s approach, the “feeling of life” and life’s dispositional mood can be altered as it is expressed—and intensified or deflected—in wonder or doubt, reverence or anxiety, enthusiasm or boredom. This feeling of life finds its expression not only in classically conceived Greek discourses concerning ontology and metaphysics but also in religion, poetry, ethics, politics, and other forms of self-reflective historical life. Misch explicitly extended this point further by demonstrating the multiple origins of philosophy within the Greek context, which have religious, poetic, and ethical dimensions as well as ontological ones, as well as in other cultural matrices such as those of ancient India and China. In contrast to thinkers such as Heidegger and his successors, who take history to entail an exclusive dynamic and potential that now afflicts the entire globe while remaining a primarily Occidental question, Misch interpreted philosophy historically as both a local— through the exemplary philosophical adventures of ancient Greece, India, and China—and as a global and existentially human phenomenon. The hermeneutical attentiveness and receptiveness to the thing and object in Dilthey and Misch encourages the articulation of the historical fabric of life as intrinsically heterogeneous and irreducible in its unfathomability to one perspective or model; no matter how dynamically it is conceived or whether it is conceived according to the “event” of being. The Daoist transition between perspectives to the meontological event of the emptiness of non-being, a topic we will return to in Heidegger and Chan Buddhism in Chapter 8, indicates the limits of the priority of ontology, no matter how radically it might be thought through the event of being, in Western philosophizing.80

6

Phenomenology, Eurocentrism, and Asia: Husserl and Heidegger

Introduction A number of works published since the lifetime of Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) have shown the germaneness of classical phenomenology for interpreting Asian philosophies—such as Confucianism and Daoism, as examined in previous chapters, and Buddhism, as discussed in this and subsequent two chapters— and for articulating a more extensive intercultural conception and practice of philosophy and hermeneutics. This chapter contextualizes and analyzes the discourses concerning phenomenology and Asian philosophy through an examination of its reception of Buddhism and the conception of Europe and Asia, Occident and Orient, in the writings of two early phenomenological thinkers. An analysis of this problematic in Husserl and Heidegger underscores the limits of standard phenomenology for intercultural philosophy and indicates what else is required in articulating an adequate intercultural hermeneutics. The reflections of Husserl and Heidegger concluded, in opposition to Misch’s opening up of the field of philosophy, with their conception of the intrinsically European-Western character of philosophy and the unique and exclusive spiritual identity and social-cultural history of Europe. Their philosophies of history and understandings of philosophy, rather than an explicit notion of racial identity, shaped and confined their interpretations of Asia and Asian thought. Both Husserl and Heidegger had moments of positive engagement with Asian thought as well as moments of refusal and rejection. As we shall consider below, Husserl discussed Buddhism in a sympathetic manner in two small texts from the mid-1920s, discovering in them a source of ethical and cultural renewal in attunement with his own project of ethical revitalization.1 As explored previously in Chapters 4 and 5, Heidegger explicitly engaged with Daoist and Japanese themes in his postwar writings. He employed

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at times a hybrid Daoist language in speaking about emptiness and the thing. Nevertheless, while Husserl and Heidegger had moments of engagement with and openness toward Asian philosophy that have inspired later work in comparative phenomenology and disclosed possibilities for furthering the project of a “hybrid” intercultural and comparative philosophizing, they both problematically restricted in distinctive yet overlapping ways the scope of philosophical reflection and dialogue through the essentialistic identitythinking that characterized their understanding of the ideas of Asia, Europe, and philosophy itself. Questions examined in this chapter include: To what extent is the philosophy of Husserl and Heidegger open to non-Western philosophical sources? To what extent do their conceptions of philosophy, its history, and “Europe” limit the possibility of a genuine encounter with non-Western philosophy as philosophical? Is phenomenology inherently Eurocentric or does it suggest intercultural possibilities beyond its European origins? Is it limited as an intercultural philosophy by the limitations of classical phenomenologists? Are there other forms of phenomenological practice, such as Buddhist or Daoist phenomenologies?

Part One: Phenomenology and Buddhism Phenomenology as movement and way What is phenomenology? Phenomenology ordinarily signifies the investigation (logos) of that which appears (phainomenon). The word is commonly understood, outside of phenomenology as a philosophical movement, to be experiential description from the first-person perspective. Critics of phenomenology, including contemporary ones as diverse as Daniel Dennett, John Searle, and speculative realism and object-oriented ontology, construe it as being intrinsically subjective, idealistic, and trapped within the first-person point of view.2 The word “phenomenology” has an older history in modern physics and philosophy as the observational description of physical phenomena (as seen in Kant’s use of the term) and the immanent experiential unfolding of selfunderstanding (as evident in Hegel’s use of the word in his Phenomenology of Spirit). Phenomenology, as inaugurated as a philosophical task and style by Husserl and transformed through multiple variations in subsequent figures inside and outside of the disciple of professional academic philosophy, has never

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exclusively signified description from the first-person perspective. Husserl formulated phenomenology as a descriptive and structural-analytic method that uncovers the conditions and structures of the first-person perspective as well as those of the interpersonal second person and impersonal third person. Instead of reaching an isolated abstract ego, or engaging in psychological self-introspection that only reflects the self, Husserl’s descriptive and analytic approach to experience in the first-person perspective discloses through the reductions—which Husserl acknowledges are incomplete and in need of being repeatedly enacted—the very belonging and relationality of all experience and consciousness in the phenomenon of intentionality in its passivity and directedness toward the object. Phenomenology has aimed at disclosing the real through the analysis of the living experiential subject. It was Husserl’s teacher Franz Brentano (1838–1917) who he credited with rediscovering the medieval idea of intentionality as the directionality of consciousness.3 The basic phenomenon of intentionality encompasses the dynamic relations between the subject and the objective world. Husserl elucidated phenomenology accordingly in the Logical Investigations as an attempt to return to the things themselves (“zu den Sachen selbst”). Husserl clarified in Ideas that this task signifies: “returning from talk and opinions to the things themselves, questioning them as they are themselves given, and setting aside all prejudices alien to them.”4 It is this undertaking that led him to the phenomenology of transcendental subjectivity, which concerns the conditions and constitution of meaning and meaningfulness. It does and cannot ignore nor exclude alterity, facticity, reality, or the passivity of the subject, as more careful assessments of Husserl’s published and previously unpublished works and the phenomenological tradition have recognized.5 Immanuel Kant maintained in the Critique of Pure Reason that the transcendental idealist is the genuine empirical realist.6 Husserl’s meaningholism, one of multiple anti-Cartesian themes unfolded in his phenomenological reconstruction of Descartes’s Meditations in the Cartesian Meditations,7 is in agreement with Kant’s sentiment while not allowing him to accept the dualism between what appears and does not appear to consciousness in Kant’s critical philosophy. Husserl’s conception of “transcendental idealism”—a label that has produced much misunderstanding of his thinking even among his own students—addresses how sense and meaning are possible for subjects qua subjects who are conscious of objects. In the classic formulation of intentionality as consciousness being in each case the “consciousness of something,” the “of ” operates as a relational term. The analysis of the constituents and the relationality

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of consciousness, a holistic arc or circuit between the intentional and nonintentional that makes Cartesianism and dualism in general impossible, has been interpreted as an overlapping concern in Husserl and—in particular, for instance, Abhidharma and Yogācāra—Buddhism.8 Intentionality signifies that experiences are directed and oriented toward and informed by things and the world without appealing to the doctrine of realism. Husserl rejected realism in the sense of a metaphysical or mystical postulation of an unexperienced and uninterpreted, or non-constituted and non-mediated, reality (i.e., of the “de re” separated from the “de dicto”): Consciousness describes how the world becomes manifest: The attempt to conceive the universe of true being as something lying outside the universe of possible consciousness, possible knowledge, possible evidence, the two being related to one another merely externally by a rigid law, is nonsensical. They belong together essentially; and as belonging together essentially, they are also concretely one, one in the only absolute concretion: transcendental subjectivity.9

Phenomenology after, and in a significant sense already with, Husserl has been anti-phenomenological (in the ordinary sense of the word we began with above) to the extent that it has radically questioned the naiveté, prejudices, and self-certainty of subjectivity and the first-person perspective. It has challenged the everyday privileging of the subject’s point of view in the natural attitude, lifeworld, the everydayness of being-there, or the self-certainty of the ego oblivious to the other. Phenomenological interpretation is not the imposition of subjectivity or the first-person perspective onto things that its critics fear; it is a way for the first-person perspective to open itself to the encounter with its world, others, and itself. Maurice Merleau-Ponty noted how phenomenology is not a philosophy of essences detached from their existence and facticity: “But phenomenology is also a philosophy which places essences back into existence, and does not expect to arrive at an understanding of humans and the world from any starting point other than that of their ‘facticity.’”10 Phenomenology, according to MerleauPonty, is the only philosophy that places subjectivity back into the body and the world. By thematizing the relational and reversible between of subject and object, evident in touching/being touched, phenomenological inquiry does so without either naively trusting or losing sight of the first-person perspective and its roles in knowing and acting. The phenomenological orientation toward what stands outside the subject is evident throughout the history of phenomenology. Phenomenology, Heidegger

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remarked, is attentiveness to the self-appearing of things: “To let what shows itself be seen from itself, just as it shows itself from itself [sich von ihm selbst her zeigt].”11 Heidegger would in his later thought, which moves from the methodological priority of the question of human Dasein (being-there) as that being that poses the question of being in Being and Time to that of the question of Sein (being) as the orienting point of his thinking, question the paradigm of transcendental subjectivity for the sake of encountering things in letting releasement (Gelassenheit) that releases and liberates the subject as much as the thing.12 Emmanuel Levinas, an exemplary instance of an anti-phenomenological phenomenologist, problematized the priority of the subject, and the individualistic language of self-constitution, for the sake of the encounter with, or more precisely exposure to, the other that is prior to and in a significant way constitutes the sense of self and world. It is in this sense that ethics precedes the ontological and transcendental philosophizing of being and the subject in Heidegger and Husserl. Early or “classical” phenomenologies begin with the experiential encounter with phenomena in order to analyze the structures of consciousness and transcendental subjectivity (Husserl), organic existence (Scheler), pre-reflective and reflective existence (Sartre), ways of being-there (Heidegger), forms of living as an embodied being and as reversible flesh (Merleau-Ponty), and the asymmetrical and non-identical relations of the other with the self (Levinas). Phenomenology has accordingly not been limited to a specific content or doctrine, as every facet—and in particular his transcendental understanding of phenomenology—of Husserl’s project has been questioned, rejected, and reinterpreted, in the variations— hermeneutical, ontological, existential, life-philosophical, deconstructive, and naturalized among others—of phenomenology for over the past 100 years. The underlying tendency of these philosophers, to speak summarily, is articulating an alternative to the self-absorbed naiveté of subjective understanding without falling into the illusions of an objectivism that presupposes the first- and second-person perspectives that it seeks to forget and suppress. Phenomenology is accordingly both a historical phenomenon to be revisited and an experiential encounter with appearances and, as later phenomenologies has demonstrated, non-appearances (such as the invisible and inapparent) that can renew and transform our conception and practice of phenomenology. Husserl conceived of phenomenology as a way to revitalize universal (i.e., for him, Western) philosophy by returning to the phenomena to be thought and renew European culture in the journal Kaizō (ᬍ䗴, Renewal or Reconstruction)

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articles (published in Japan in 1923–1924), and The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy (1936).13 These works, as elucidated in this chapter, concerned with crisis and renewal encompass Husserl’s fundamental ethically oriented concerns and remain relevant to our conflict-ridden age shaped by struggles between universalism and particularism. There is, nonetheless, a questionable dimension of universalism and cosmopolitanism that has historically privileged the West and been employed to subjugate and marginalize others. There is an overinflated conception of Europe and the Occident, which Husserl interpreted as the sole cultural unity that is genuinely universal and infinite. The priority of the Occidental, and philosophy construed as a unique attribute of the West, problematically resonates in Heidegger, Levinas, and other figures shaped by the phenomenological movement. Notable exceptions to the tendency to define philosophy as intrinsically European include Merleau-Ponty.14 Merleau-Ponty noted that: “[philosophy’s] center is everywhere, its circumference nowhere.”15 Philosophy cannot be constrained to Greek origins and borders, the Occidental history of metaphysics and ontotheology, a European homeland, and Western modernity. Accordingly, at the same time that it has prevalent Eurocentric propensities, phenomenology has been and continues to be—through its emphasis on immanently elucidating experience and attentively encountering and responding to the phenomena—a significant bridge between Western and non-Western forms of thinking. It is not accidental that phenomenology was enthusiastically adopted and transformed in East Asia and throughout the globe along with its encouraging and informing Western research into non-Western sources and discourses. Phenomenological interpretation has itself proved to be “reversible,” transversible, and not confined to the borders of its Occidental origins. Despite its troubling and question-worthy Eurocentric moments considered in this chapter, phenomenology has stimulated and continues to inspire philosophical dialogues across diverse perspectives and traditions in order to be exposed and responsive to that which is to be encountered.

The European reception of Buddhism The modern European missionary and philosophical reception of Buddhism construed it either as a superstitious pagan cult or as a negative, pessimistic, and—after the term was popularized in the late nineteenth-century—nihilistic

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philosophy grounded on the principle of nothingness. The distinction between a vulgar and superstitious set of popular practices, criticized by Christian missionaries, and a higher Buddhist philosophy gradually developed in the early modern European reception of Buddhism. Philosophers such as Hegel construed Buddhism as understanding “ultimate reality as merely ‘nothing’ or ‘not-being,’” lacking his own dialectical insight that nothing can be a negative name for the consummate and for plenitude.16 The nineteenth-century French historians Edgar Quinet and Ernest Renan would in a similar spirit describe the Buddha as “the great Christ of emptiness” and Buddhism as the “church of nihilism.”17 Arthur Schopenhauer reversed the negative analysis of Buddhist “negativity,” portraying it as an ethos— superior to Christianity and religions of redemption—of overcoming the will, its egoism and attachments, and consequently suffering. Schopenhauer’s elucidation and appropriation of Buddhism would shape its German reception—including Richard Wagner and Nietzsche—into the twentiethcentury.18 Nietzsche recognized affinities between his philosophy and Buddhism, praising Buddhism at times, while more typically rejecting it as an ascetic and passive nihilistic form of world- and life-denial.19 The word “nihilism” is derived from the Latin word nihil (nothing); neither it nor “pessimism” is a traditional Buddhist concept. Nietzsche’s assessment of Buddhism is an additional example of the intercultural and intertextual character of modern philosophy given how it is interwoven with his critique of Schopenhauer’s philosophy. There is accordingly an intercultural problematic of pessimism and nihilism encompassing Buddhism, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. This nexus was introduced into China, mediated through Japanese scholarship, by intellectuals such as the “pessimistic” philosopher and poet Wang Guowei ⥟ ೟㎁ (1877–1927) and the philosopher and revolutionary Zhang Taiyan ゴ໾ ♢ (1868–1936).20 Wang first encountered Schopenhauer in 1899 and became interested in Nietzsche through his reading of Schopenhuaer. Wang introduced both thinkers to China with a series of essays such as “Shubenhua yu Nicai” ন ᴀ㧃㟛ሐ䞛 (“Schopenhauer and Nietzsche”) published in 1904, which revealed Schopenhauer’s profound influence on him and that can be seen in his pathbreaking modern interpretation of the canonical novel The Dream of the Red Chamber (Hongloumeng ㋙ῧ໶). Nietzsche’s portrait of Buddhism as a religion based in the negative lifedenying emotions of resentment and revenge and a schematization of repression was rejected as dubious and overly psychological by Max Weber.21 Weber

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shared the perspective of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in which Buddhism was construed as an ascetic world-denying religion. Weber interpreted it as a “theodicy of suffering,” a teaching that made suffering meaningful and thereby bearable, and a practical ethos and worldly comportment guiding the everyday life of lay communities in his classical sociological analysis of the economic ethics of the world religions, which was examined in regard to Confucianism in Chapter 1.22 Divergent and contradictory ways of imagining the Buddha and Buddhism emerged, based on the translation and frequent conflation of sources from a diverse range of Buddhist discourses, as European thinkers in the nineteenthcentury debated issues such as whether (1) the Buddha’s teaching was worldnegating and pessimistic or an other-oriented ethics and way of life emphasizing compassion and tranquility of mind; (2) its epistemology was empiricist or idealistic; (3) its highest principle concerned liberation or annihilation; and (4) its highest reality (nirvana) signified nothingness, the pantheistic unity of God and nature, the absolute in itself, or a primordial potentiality beyond and encompassing both being and not being. As Confucius faded as an image of the enlightened philosopher in the European imagination, an Enlightenment elucidation and exemplification of the life and teaching of the Buddha grew in prominence. The bodhi (awakening) of the Buddha was construed as a form of Enlightenment in analogy to the European idea of Enlightenment, particularly in Germany in the works of the Indologist Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900). He interpreted bodhi in light of the Kantian idea of Aufklärung as coming into maturity and the achievement of moral autonomy.23 While some figures emphasized Kant in explicating Buddhism, others turned to the paradigm of empiricist philosophy and the natural sciences. Karl Friedrich Köppen (1808–1863) popularized the image of the Buddha in the German context as an ethically oriented empiricist in his 1857 work The Religion of the Buddha (Die Religion des Buddha).24 The Austrian physicist and empiricist philosopher Ernst Mach (1838–1916), a self-described atheist opposed to religion, claimed that he appreciated Buddhism as a nonmetaphysical, non-religious, and radically empiricist philosophy and the Buddha’s refusal to answer questions that were metaphysical pseudo-problems. Mach interpreted the Buddha’s teaching as sharing a skeptical ethos and an empirical analysis of the senses with Hume and himself, while stressing that— despite these affinities—his own approach was developed independently of Buddhism.25

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Husserl’s interests in “the awakened one” (Skt. Buddha; the Pāli nominative form “Buddho” is used in a number of texts from this era) was also mediated by the European Enlightenment interpretation of the Buddha’s teaching. The “original historical” Buddha, as presented via the Pāli canon, was interpreted as a philosopher and figure of Enlightenment—in the Western sense—in distinction from what modern Westerners perceived as later Buddhist religious and superstitious misinterpretations. The disparity between the original philosopher and the later “fallen” transmission is still maintained in Karl Jaspers’s 1950s portrayal in the first volume of The Great Philosophers as well as in contemporary appropriations that wish to see a naturalistic progressive thinker in the Buddha in distinction from the incense and idols of popular Buddhist religious practices.26

Husserl and the Buddha It is this Buddha, imagined through the European Enlightenment tradition, who might be analogous to Socrates, as Husserl described in a brief recently published text entitled “Socrates-Buddha” related to his research during the 1925–1926 winter semester, and dated from January 1926.27 This is the later text of two short pieces on the Buddha that Husserl composed in the mid1920s. There are few other direct references to the Buddha and Buddhism in his corpus.28 In the text “Socrates-Buddha,” Husserl compares Greek Socratic and Indian Buddhist ways of pursuing knowledge. While the Buddhist path pursues unconstrained knowing (rücksichtlos Erkenntnis) through the goals of redemption or emancipation (Erlösung), and bliss (Seligkeit), the Socratic way of knowing pursues theoretical knowing for its own sake and for the sake of its own form of praxis.29 Both have their own form of autonomy in their pursuit of truth, but the Buddhist aims at an ethical-religious truth (with its own philosophical significance), and it is Socrates and Plato who realize the full independence and responsibility of thinking as a universal science and objective theorizing about the world in radical separation from the practical concerns of life.30 The Buddhist universal renunciation of the world (Weltentsagung) and the Socratic “transcendental attitude” are both expressions of the “categorical imperative of renunciation” (“kategorische Imperativ der Entsagung”).31 The Buddhist ethicalreligious attitude is accordingly post-mythic and atheistic; it points toward the full autonomy of the theoretical attitude through its practices of renunciation.

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But it does not achieve the appropriate transcendental perspective that is revealed in the history of Western philosophy and the sciences. Buddhist thinking in its form and logic in some ways approaches the transcendental as a higher more reflective form of naturalistic thinking, which Husserl associates with the natural attitude of ordinary everyday life. It is the Socratic attitude that—akin to the Cartesian bracketing of the world described in the Cartesian Meditations—decisively breaks with the natural attitude as such for the sake of attaining a theoretical and transcendental attitude. Buddhist meditative practices evoke this transformation of perspectives without however achieving it. It is the latter achievement that constitutes and distinguished the distinctively Greek and Western understanding of beings through scientific knowledge.32 Indian thinkers can undertake and practice philosophy in a way through their own concerns, yet these concerns have a practical character and these thinkers cannot be considered “philosophers” in the genuine sense of the word. They are only philosophical by being taken up from the Western philosophical perspective in Western philosophical discourses. Indian thought, as it will be judged later in the Crisis, is essentially practical and ethical-religious—aimed at attaining ethical-religious self-transformation and soteriological redemption— rather than theoretical. Indian thought accordingly has the “highest practical dignity.” Yet it cannot be said to have reached the theory-oriented philosophical and scientific standpoint characteristic of Western thinking in Husserl’s assessment.33 Husserl’s slightly earlier first short writing concerning the Buddha is a review of The Speeches of Gautama Buddha (Die Reden Gotamo Buddhos) published in 1925.34 Karl Eugen Neumann (1865–1915) was a scholar and translator of the Pāli Buddhist Tripiṭaka. “The Speeches of Gautama Buddha” was a three volume translation of Pāli language Theravāda Buddhist discourses attributed to the historical Buddha from the Majjhima Nikaya (“Basket of Middle-length Discourses”) of the Sutta Pitaka. Unlike the other early piece, the Buddhist teaching is perceived in Husserl’s brief enthusiastic review as parallel to the highest achievements of Western civilization. It offers sources for reflection and renewal in the West: Buddhist lived-experiences, conceptions, and religiosity point Christian Europeans back to their own philosophical and ethical-religious origins and sources. Husserl notes that the “breaking through” (Einbruch) of Buddhist religiosity into the contemporary European horizon can help revive and reawaken Europe to itself and its own insights.35 The West cannot adopt the Buddhist horizon but it can reform and renew its own through the encounter with Buddhist and Indian

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thought. The implication of Husserl’s account is that the intercultural encounter does or should not occur as a conversion or even a hybrid fusion; the encounter with and “breaking through” (Einbruch) of the other allows one to perceive and interpret oneself in the intersecting contexts of what is being encountered and one’s own distinctive past in order to become awakened to the possibility of being genuinely oneself. The language of “break” (Bruch) was also at play as breakthrough (Durchbruch) in Georg Misch’s work examined in Chapter 5. According to Misch, “the very name Buddha—the Enlightened—shows the connections of Buddhism with philosophical knowledge.”36 In contrast to Husserl’s interpretation, the Buddha’s life and teaching indicate a break and transition from a “natural” to a genuinely philosophical comportment in Misch’s argument for the intrinsically plural and intercultural origins of philosophy. Western theoretical rationality is accordingly one exemplary case in Misch’s account rather than the sole paradigm of genuine philosophical thinking as it is for Husserl. The encounter with Buddhism does not lead to understanding it as another origin of philosophy in Husserl’s inquiry. Its dignity is practical and it signifies that Europeans need to recover and renew their own transcendental philosophical tradition that is deep in crisis, as Europe itself is undergoing breakdown (Zusammenbruch) with its contemporary “degenerate culture” (entarteten Kultur). The Buddha’s endeavors are explicitly described in this 1925 piece as having a “transcendental” rather than “transcendent” orientation and import that now can codetermine (mitzubestimmen) “our” (European) contemporary ethicalreligious and philosophical consciousness.37 Husserl reduced this transcendental dimension of Buddhism to a quasi-transcendental status in the 1925 text. It will disappear by the time of the Crisis that tightly binds the universal infinite tasks and aspirations of the transcendental attitude with the history and fate of the West, as will be considered further below. Buddhist ethical-religious strategies of spiritual purification and pacification are, insofar as they address us from their pure original source (that is, the teaching of the historical Buddha in contrast to the later decayed tradition), described as being of the “highest dignity.”38 The Buddha is grasped here as an exemplary figure embodying rationality and humanism. Husserl even associated the Buddha in this text with “transcendental” inquiry into the conditions of subjectivity that he subsequently claimed in “Socrates-Buddha” (1926) and in the Crisis (1935–1936) is a uniquely Western achievement. Husserl’s image of the Buddha is near to while departing from the imagined Buddha of the Western Enlightenment. The Buddha is an Enlightened

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ethical-religious reformer with philosophical significance; he is, however, not a philosopher per se and does not adequately achieve the purely theoretical attitude of the Western philosophical tradition that is visible in a tradition stemming from Socrates and extending through Galileo, Descartes, and Kant to the crisis-riddled present in which it is in need of revitalization. The theoretical attitude alone is the adequate basis of renewal and a transformative emancipatory practice. Husserl’s Socrates is a better archetype than the Buddha. Socrates is a figure of radical critique, transformation, and liberation aiming at a new formation of life centered in individual autonomy and collective responsibility.39 The Buddha has parallels to Socrates in Husserl’s depiction, while lacking this genuine theoretical stance that is constitutive of a culture of reason in which autonomous life freely forms itself. In the middle of the chaotic Weimar Republic, as examined earlier in Chapter 2, cosmopolitan-oriented thinkers such as Driesch, Keyserling, Lessing, and Wilhelm advocated an “exchange of light” with the East and hoped for a new cultural fusion. As in Buber’s speech “China and Us” and Heidegger’s “Wege zur Aussprache” (1937) and Spiegel Interview (1966), Husserl contended in his 1925 review that one must reencounter one’s past and one’s own (Europe as a culture of theoretical reason) in encountering the other (the practical teachings of the Buddha). Husserl’s Europe can encounter, interact with, and learn from Buddhism, yet the most essential teaching of this breakthrough and encounter is that Europe must redeem itself by reengaging and renewing its own origins and traditions. Unlike Heidegger’s thesis of the necessity of confronting and remaining with the Greek origins of the West, this task entails reviving a different Greece that Husserl identified with the perspective of transcendental philosophy and a culture of science and reason.

Husserl and the Kaizō between crisis and renewal There is an intense sense of crisis that pervaded German life and thought in the early twentieth century, including academic philosophy, as we have seen in previous chapters. The sense of a crisis of European civilization is already present in Husserl’s earlier 1910–1911 essay “Philosophy as Rigorous Science” (“Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft”), which polemicized against the twofold threats of the naturalistic and historicist relativizing and destruction of reason and the sciences.40 Husserl addresses the decline and crisis of rationality and science further in the Cartesian Meditations, initially given as lectures in Paris in 1929 and

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published in 1931, claiming that (1) when Western philosophy is viewed as a unitary science, its decline since the middle of the nineteenth-century is patent and (2) the positive sciences are troubled by a crisis of their foundations and fundamental concepts and methods.41 A response to this crisis is possible by renewing the radicalness of self-responsibility; renewal requires a culture of autonomy and the realization or rational responsibility that Husserl perceived in Descartes in the Cartesian Meditations and elsewhere in historical figures such as Socrates and Galileo.42 As seen repeatedly throughout the present work, East Asian and Western intellectuals were encountering the crises unleashed by modernization and reflecting on possibilities for renewal and reconstruction. This overlapping intercultural sense of the aporiae and paradoxes of modernity helps clarify why Husserl’s articles on renewal could be published and be of interest in a Japanese setting. The Japanese journal Kaizō published contributions by Husserl, John Dewey, Albert Einstein, Heinrich Rickert, and Bertrand Russell in the early 1920s.43 Tadayoshi Akita, an editor of Kaizō, invited Husserl to contribute to the journal in August 1922. Husserl sent him three contributions: “Renewal: Its Problem and Its Method” (“Erneuerung: Ihr Problem und ihre Methode”) and, the following year, “The Method of Essential Inquiry” (“Die Methode der Wesensforschung”) and “Renewal as an Ethical Problem for the Individual” (“Erneuerung als individualethisches Problem”). His related article “The Idea of a Philosophical Culture: Its Original Germination in Greek Philosophy” (“Die Idee einer philosophischen Kultur: Ihr erstes Aufkeimen in der griechischen Philosophie”) appeared in another journal Japanese-German Journal of Science and Technology (Japanisch-deutsche Zeitschrift für Wissenschaft und Technik) in 1923.44 Two related articles were left unpublished at the time: “Renewal and Science” (“Erneuerung und Wissenschaft”) (1922/23) and “Formal Types of Culture in Human Development” (“Formale Typen der Kultur in der Menschheitsentwicklung”) (1922/23). Prior to the National Socialist assumption of power, and his extensive account of a crisis of science and the lifeworld (Lebenswelt) in the mid-1930s, the sense of intellectual and spiritual crisis is articulated in Husserl’s Kaizō articles. Husserl’s publications in Japan articulate a situation that calls for ethical-cultural renewal by returning to the origins of theoretical and scientific thinking and a culture and ethos that supports it. Mostly appearing in the Japanese journal Kaizō, the articles are primarily about renewing a universal culture of reason and humanity based on Husserl’s own phenomenology and the Western tradition of

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rational humanism stemming from classical Greece. Greece developed a culture of rational freedom and of philosophy as a rigorous science in contrast to the prescientific forms of knowledge of the “old Babylonians, Egyptians, Chinese, and even the Indians (selbst Indern).”45 Indian Buddhism, as described above, came closest to the achievements of the West in Husserl’s writings in the 1920s. Husserl specifically addresses the Japanese in these texts only insofar as their efforts at renewal are part of their joining in and contributing to a common “European cultural labor,” as Japan becomes a “fresh blossoming branch” of “ ‘European’ culture” (“frisch grünenden Zweig der ‘europaischen’ Kultur”).46 These publications represent—in contrast to the efforts by Dewey and Russell to engage Eastern questions in their contributions to the Kaizō—a missed opportunity for encountering Japanese and East Asian thinking and engaging in intercultural dialogue. There is a remarkable lack of interest in and engagement with Asian philosophy and the contemporary Asian situation in Husserl’s contributions to the Kaizō.

Buddhism and the phenomenological movement Even though there are relatively few direct textual references to Buddhist and Asian philosophy in his publications, there are additional indications of Husserl’s interests in Eastern philosophy in other sources. There are also early comparisons between the phenomenological method of epochè (reduction) and the Buddhist meditative disclosures of the conditions and constituents of experience and consciousness. An early example from 1921 of the latter occurs in an article by the Polish Indologist and philosopher Stanisław Shayer (1899–1941), the first director of the Oriental Institute of the University of Warsaw, on the Mahāyāna teaching of liberation. He described epochè (bracketing) as the method of the Buddha in reducing positive knowledge to its minimum and the fundamental tendency of Mahāyāna Buddhism. The Buddhist epochè is more radical, as a critique of the obscuring conditions of consciousness aimed at redemption (releasement and emancipation), than the transcendental philosophies of Kant and Husserl that intend to elucidate the genesis and conditions of consciousness for the sake of a foundational grounding of knowledge.47 A decade later Dorion Cairns (1901–1973) observed the interest in Indian philosophy of both Husserl and his assistant Eugen Fink (1905–1975) in his record of their conversations.48 Fink was Husserl’s research assistant from 1928 until 1938. Cairns worked with Husserl and Fink in Freiburg during the years

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1924–1926 and 1931–1932. He subsequently became an early advocate and translator of Husserl’s works in the United States. Cairns remarked in his Conversations with Husserl and Fink that Fink claimed: “the various phases of Buddhist self-discipline were essentially phases of phenomenological reduction.”49 Fink noted he reports the affinities between Husserl’s phenomenology and Buddhist philosophy. Fink’s recognition of the transcendental dimension of Buddhist self-analysis is more in accord with Husserl’s statements in the 1925 review than the 1926 “Socrates-Buddha” in which Husserl identifies Buddhism with a higher form of the natural attitude.50 Just as the reduction gradually elucidated the structures of experience, so Buddhist meditation revealed the aggregations that condition experience. Both point toward and structurally analyze the role of the perceiver (the “I”) and consciousness in constituting a sense of the world, revealing intentionality and interdependence (dependent origination; Skt. pratītyasamutpāda) as its basic conditions. In these remarks, it is clear that the intentionality disclosed in the reductions is not merely subjective; it reveals the correlational character of consciousness and world. On the one hand, the practice of the phenomenological method appears to have strong affinities with meditative practices that suspend or bracket the ordinary interests of the mundane world of the “natural attitude” to immanently describe, articulate, and analyze the—transcendental or quasi-transcendental— preconditions and structures of experience, consciousness, and the self or nonself. On the other hand, the framework and goals of Husserlian and Buddhist phenomenologies are radically divergent. Husserl aimed at achieving the traditional Western philosophical idea of a rational grounding of the sciences on the basis of a conception of philosophy as a rigorous science, the science of sciences, or “first philosophy.” Given this particular overly narrow conception of philosophy, Husserl can define philosophy as characteristic of the Western tradition from the Greek Pre-Socratics through the emergence of the new sciences with Galileo and Descartes to his own time. The narrowness of his conception of philosophy did not permit him to recognize genuine philosophy among the Indians and Chinese, as will be examined later in the chapter. Fink elucidated Buddhism at a number of points in his own works in a way that goes beyond the limits of his mentor. He was particularly interested in the encounter with suffering and the correlated concept of saṃsāra in Buddhism, addressing Nietzsche’s portrait of Buddhism and Christianity as “religions of the suffering, the sick and the weak.”51 According to Fink, the Buddha’s encounter with the poverty, sickness, and death of others surpassed Prince Siddhartha’s

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intentions, compelling him to pursue the path or redemption and awakening.52 Such encounters with suffering and accordingly the “nothing” in the midst of life, Fink noted, are not contingent or merely ontic experiences; they disclose a more primordial reality as well as the deep philosophical sensibility contained within Buddhism.53 Fink argued that Buddhism does not treat the nothing merely negatively, as merely derivative of being or as a negation as will be discussed in detail in Chapter 8 in relation to Heidegger’s elucidation of the nothing, but as a fundamental “principle” of being.54 Fink thereby challenged the dominant Schopenhauerian and pessimist elucidation of Buddhism that dominated its German reception.55 It is this nexus of issues that concern Fink and motivate his reflections concerning the phenomenological reduction and Buddhist notions such as “nothingness” (the historically characteristic European way of [mis-]interpreting emptiness or śūnyatā), suffering, and the structure of worldly existence as saṃsāra.56 Fink’s focus on the phenomenon of suffering in Buddhism as the disclosure of an ontological condition has a source in Max Scheler’s understanding of Buddhism in his 1916 essay “The Meaning of Suffering” (“Vom Sinn des Leidens”). Scheler denies the idea, maintained in previous Western interpretations, that Buddhism is a form of pessimistic resignation and negation of the world. Buddhism has a far different imperative then that seen in Schopenhauer. Scheler describes Buddhism in this text, in which he praises Neumann’s translation, as a profound philosophical meditation and practical instruction on pain and suffering, elucidating its essence and origins, and as the highest exemplar of a definitive ideal comportment toward the reality of suffering.57 Meditative techniques of encountering pain and suffering are not systematically established in Christianity as they are in yogic and Buddhist practices. Scheler’s late works would no doubt not be what they were without the stimulus of his interpretation of Buddhist sources. At the same time, Scheler stressed the unique transcending power visible, on his reading, in the Christian unity of the horror of suffering and active responsive love toward the sufferer—manifested in the passion/ redemption of Christ—in contrast to what he judged to be the impersonal, passive, and less emotive compassion and sympathy articulated in Buddhism.58 The few references to Buddhism in Heidegger’s writings mostly have a negative sense in contrast with his appreciation and creative employment of Daoism. These references mostly occur in the 1930s and appear to adopt Nietzsche’s negative understanding of Buddhism as passive nihilism. Heidegger in one of his central works unpublished during his lifetime, Contributions to Philosophy (Of Event) written between 1936 and 1938, remarked that his

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philosophical project cannot be identified with Buddhism. It is not a nearing to being (Sein) that overcomes our attachment to and prioritizing of beings (Seiende): The less that humans are beings, the less that they adhere obstinately to the beings they find themselves to be, all the nearer do they come to being (Sein). (Not a Buddhism! The opposite!). Beings in their emergence to themselves (ancient Greece); caused by a highest instance of their essence (Middle Ages); things present at hand as objects (modern era).59

Heidegger’s thinking as made clear in this passage and throughout his oeuvre concerns a uniquely Western decision and destiny of being. But why is the movement from beings to being, a transition away from metaphysics to the thinking of being, the opposite of Buddhism? There is a significant clue in the circumstance that most of these references to the Buddha and Buddhism occur in the context of his account of Nietzsche and Nietzsche’s association of Buddhism with the negativity of nihilism.60 This attitude contrasts with Heidegger’s adaptation of a Daoist notion of nothingness and emptiness that is already discernible in “What is Metaphysics?” in 1928. Heidegger’s unreceptive references to Buddhism might appear surprising given his more positive appropriation of Daoism and his later remarks that praise Buddhism as a traditional form of life in a conversation with the Thai monk Bhikkhu Maha Mani in fall 1963 and Buddhists such as Daisetsu Teitarō Suzuki (1870–1966), famously stating after reading his book that he and Suzuki were endeavoring to say the same thing.61 Heidegger’s stance toward Asia and Asian philosophy is inconsistent, as argued in other chapters of this work. Heidegger’s relation with Zen Buddhism, including his odd anxiety—expressed in the Spiegel Interview conducted in 1966—of a Zen Buddhist or other Eastern philosophical “adoption” or “take over” (Übernahme) of the West, will be examined further in Chapter 7.62 A passage from an earlier work helps clarify what Heidegger meant here. Heidegger posed the question in the post-Second World War Bremen and Freiburg Lectures whether the guest of nihilism is from the East or the West. He answered that both have opened the door for it and are incapable of responding to it.63 That is to say, no adaptation or take-over from the East can remove this “uncanny guest” and answer the crisis of nihilism, and the danger of “European Buddhism,” diagnosed by Nietzsche in the previous century, namely that “the highest values devalue themselves. The aim is lacking; ‘why’ finds no answer.”64 The hesitations of Husserl and Heidegger have not prevented the emergence of a fruitful dialogue between phenomenology and Asian philosophies. The interpretive encounter between phenomenology and Buddhist and Indian

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philosophy has been a productive one in intercultural and comparative philosophy. There have been a number of significant works after Husserl examining the affinities between Husserl’s phenomenology and Buddhist and Indian philosophy.65 The diverse and fecund intercultural engagement between Western and Eastern philosophy is also visible to a certain extent with comparative and intercultural philosophical research adopting the thoughtful engagement between Heidegger and Buddhism. While Husserl frequently appears to be the preferred partner of dialogue with South Asian Buddhism, Heidegger often has this role with East Asian Buddhism, including the thinkers of the Kyoto School (Kyōto-gakuha Ҁ䛑ᅌ⌒).66 In many instances from “East” and “West,” recent and contemporary approaches to Buddhism as phenomenology have overcome the constraints and Eurocentric tendencies of the primary figures of classical phenomenology. Such exclusivist tendencies do not center on the phenomenological dimension of the thinking of Husserl and Heidegger. But they are evident in the non-phenomenological elements of their thought; in particular, in their philosophies of history with their strong conceptions of a closed or autonomous immanent development of Western philosophy as the teleological history of reason (Husserl) or the metaphysical history of the concealment/unconcealment of being (Heidegger) from ancient Greece to Western modernity.

Part Two: Husserl, Asia, and the Idea of Europe Husserl’s crises Husserl argued in the Kaizō articles that the essential character of the history of Europe is its philosophical culture formed on the basis of practical and theoretical rationality. Practical reason means the realization of a culture of autonomy and radical self-responsibility; theoretical reason signifies the rigorous practice of logic, mathematics, the sciences, and philosophy itself as a rigorous science.67 Husserl’s discursive construction of European hegemony deploys an idealized portrayal to critique the crisis tendencies and pathologies that he perceived in contemporary European life. Husserl denies that his vision of a freely formed culture of reason is a mere ideal.68 It is no mere projection or dream, nor purely normative. It is a universal will as a common will and a historically realized entelechy revealed in European spiritual (geistig, understood as intellectual and ethical-cultural) and spiritual-material (scientific and technological) history.

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Despite Husserl’s assertion of its not merely ideal and existential historical reality, there are serious tensions between these two ideas of Europe in his diagnosis of the present trapped between the Europe of universal reason and the Europe of existing unreason. Husserl urgently searched during the Weimar Republic for ways to strengthen and save the former Europe from the latter one—a sense of urgency that is more pressing in his works written after the National Socialist regime’s rise to power. Husserl’s interpretation of Europe and Asia, of East and West, in his writings of the 1930s occurs in the context of (1) an ethical and social-political crisis and, from his perspective, (2) a more fundamental crisis of rationality itself that is manifested in crises in the foundations in philosophy, science, mathematics, and logic. The 1920s were a period of economic, political, and social disaster and distress in Germany after the defeat of the First World War and the continuing instability of the Weimar Republic. Husserl addressed this crisis in an ethical and cultural language rather than in a directly social-political one. His approach differed from the turn to anti-modernist cultural pessimism in defending the modern Enlightenment project under perilous circumstances. His analysis connected this situation with a deeper crisis: the decline of reason disclosed in the early twentieth-century problematic of the rational grounding of fundamental sciences such as logic, mathematics, and physics that had fallen into question through the naturalistic and historicist relativizing and self-destruction of reason. Husserl’s concern with imperiled rationality inside and outside the sciences, forcefully expressed in the earlier Logos article (1910–1911), can be traced further through his ethical-cultural reflections in the Kaizō articles to his later writings that are gripped by the question of the fate of Europe. Husserl’s sense of emergency is full-blown in the 1935 “Vienna Lecture” on “Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity” (“Die Krisis des europäischen Menschentums und die Philosophie”) and one of his last major works The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy (Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie: Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie) published in 1936.69 These texts composed in 1935–1936 are the culmination of Husserl’s overall interpretation of his philosophical project, if not its detailed phenomenological structure that was being worked out in the incomplete Erfahrung und Urteil: Untersuchungen zur Genealogie der Logik (Experience and Judgment: Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic) published after his death in 1939.

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The Crisis and related texts were composed in the margins of National Socialist Germany after the enactment of the first racial laws and his own dismissal from university activities at the University of Freiburg in 1933. They articulated what could be described as a phenomenological critique of reason in history and a diagnostic critique of the contemporary European situation through a genealogical tracing of the historical permutations of reason in order to reconstruct the historical propensity and telos of European intellectual history for the sake of effecting the present in its crisis. Phenomenology as a science is portrayed by Husserl as an unprejudiced and neutral method of description and elucidation, such that the phenomenological status of the diagnostic and critical inclinations of the Crisis is unclear and disputed. Phenomenology takes on practical interests through its relation to the lifeworld (that is, the everyday perceptual-practical world) that is revealed in this work as having its own rational structures that generate the conditions for and orient theoretical reason and the sciences. The crises of theoretical rationality and the historical lifeworld are consequently interconnected and call for diagnostic critique informed by a genealogically and practically oriented phenomenology. Husserl relies on a medical model much as Sigmund Freud did at the beginning of his 1929 work Civilization and its Discontents (Das Unbehagen in der Kultur; literally, the uneasiness in culture) in which Freud considered whether societies and civilizations could suffer from illnesses and pathologies.70 Husserl wonders in a similar mood at the beginning of the “Vienna Lecture”: Why is there “no scientific medicine for nations and supranational communities? The European nations are sick; Europe itself, it is said, is in crisis.”71 Europe is seriously ill and threatened with catastrophe. Husserl diagnosed the underlying sickness and fundamental crisis in the Crisis texts as a pathology afflicting rationality itself instead of Freud’s naturalistic and Nietzschean analysis of the conflict and pathological relations between the demands of modern societies and the wishes arising from human biological drives. Husserl describes pathologies that are pathologies of reason; his crisis is one of “the philosophical-historical idea (or the teleological sense) of European humanity” itself.72 Husserl delineates the condition of “European sickness,” which is revealed in innumerable symptoms of the breakdown of ordinary life, as being rooted not in the repression of natural instincts but in the collapse and denial of the philosophy of spirit and spirit’s constitutive roles in ethical-cultural life.73 The crisis of modern reason is manifested in skepticism, irrationalism, and mysticism as well as the loss of meaning and value. It arises immanently

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through the self-destruction of rationality that occurs through the overreach of scientistic objectivism and naturalism that reduces and relativizes reason to the biological instincts, and the self-produced limitations and failures of the human sciences that undermined the rational humanism that is essential to the rational formation and renewal of culture.74 Such objectivism cannot “do justice to the [very] subjectivity which accomplishes science.”75 Husserl did not deny the objective biological and bodily basis of individual spiritual life; he articulated in the Crisis texts how knowing, controlling, and acting upon internal and external nature presupposes the rationality that immanently structures the lifeworld and the sciences.76 Science and technology, encompassing the encounter between humans and their environing world and the collective social labor of scientists, are spiritually mediated realities.77 There is a hermeneutical circuit, and in this sense no abyss or duality, between nature and spirit. Social ills and irrational pathologies that afflict human autonomy and dignity are not caused by nature in itself or unreason; they are internally or immanently generated by flawed factical incarnations of reason and the failure of rationality to be reproduced and practiced in the social-historical life.78

The problem of Husserl’s Eurocentrism This problematic of reason with its contemporary pathological non-realization is identified with a history extending from its origins in Greece (in Pre-Socratic philosophy of nature and Socratic ethics) through the early modern development of the new sciences to the struggle over the contemporary fate and vocation of Europe. It is uncertain from Husserl’s position in 1935–1936 whether Europe will abandon or resurrect its universal humanistic mission. This problematic and the required answer to it are described by Husserl as exclusively European possibilities, much as they are for Heidegger in the Spiegel interview. As will be examined now, Husserl’s most criticized statements identifying his thought as “Eurocentric” are taken from this nexus of concerns.79 As discussed previously, Husserl prioritized the idea of Europe and Greekborn European rationality in his publications in Japan and his encounter with Buddhism. The statements of the mid-1930s appear to take a more radically Eurocentric position. A number of questions pose and impose themselves at this juncture: Is there a difference in substance as well as tone in Husserl’s remarks about non-Europeans and non-European thinking in the Crisis texts? Was there a radical shift in

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his thinking about Europe/Asia or was there a shift in tone due to menacing circumstances of the times—the crisis of Western civilization underlying the phenomena of irrationalism and fascism? We (i.e., those who are interested in this problematic) must consider questions such as: Is phenomenology intrinsically Eurocentric? How can Husserl’s argumentation in the “Vienna Lecture” and the Crisis be simultaneously both cosmopolitan-humanistic and Eurocentric? Why is Husserl apparently most hostile to the non-Western world and philosophy in this period of deepening crisis in which European ethnocentric and particularist ideologies and regimes play such a powerful destructive role? Are these failures in Husserl’s diagnostic critique irredeemable or can Husserl’s genealogy of Western rationality and lifeworld be decolonized, provincialized, and emancipated from the aura of Eurocentrism in Husserl’s argumentation? Husserl pursues a strategy that has affinities in the appeal to spirit in defining a people that occurs in Heidegger’s discussions of Germans, Europeans, and Asians as well as Levinas’s proposal that the “yellow peril” is a spiritual rather than racial description. Husserl does not appeal to or deploy biological, naturalistic, physical, racial, or even geographical elements to define “Europe.” Europe is not, he claims, a geographically demarcated reality “as on a map, as if thereby the group of people who live together in this territory would define his defense of endangered European humanity.” Husserl problematically insists that it is rather in a “spiritual sense” that “the English Dominions, the United States, etc., clearly belong to Europe, whereas the Eskimos or Indians presented as curiosities at fairs, or the Gypsies, who constantly wander about Europe, do not.”80 The immanent developmental-teleological idea of Europe is, according to Husserl, “the standpoint of universal humanity as such” and, at the same time, there are peoples who are part of the internal “history of Europe (spiritual Europe)” and peoples who are external to it. Husserl differentiates Europe and non-Europe through a notion of familial affiliation and resemblance: No matter how hostile they may be toward one another, the European nations nevertheless have a particular inner kinship of spirit which runs through them all, transcending national differences. There is something like a sibling relationship which gives all of us in this sphere the consciousness of homeland.81

This is the consciousness of the “good European”; an expression that Husserl adopted from Nietzsche and that we saw Driesch critique as an overly limited and narrow cosmopolitanism in Chapter 2.82 One must question how such a differentiation of the spiritually immanent (the European) and transcendent (the non-European) can be posited without presupposing other less spiritual

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social, material, and even racial distinctions given that it appears to treat peoples as distinct natural collective kinds. This problem deepens when his descriptions of Chinese, Indians, and Papuans in the “Vienna Lecture” and the Crisis are interrogated. There should be a purely immanent and internal description of the spiritual reality and unity experienced as the European homeland. But, continuing the last quotation, Husserl relies on a comparative typology between the European and non-European to distinguish one family nexus from another: This [feeling of affinity] comes immediately to the fore as soon as we think ourselves into the Indian historical sphere [die indische Geschichtlichkeit], for example, with its many peoples and cultural products. In this sphere, too, there exists the unity of a family-like kinship, but one which is alien to us. Indian people, on the other hand, experience us as aliens and only one another as confreres. Yet this essential difference between familiarity and strangeness, a fundamental category of all historicity which relativizes itself in many strata, cannot suffice.83

The relativity and historicity of diverse peoples centered on familiarity and otherness is an insufficient conception that fails to adequately categorize historical humanity. Yet this insight does not lead Husserl to the decentering and destructuring of identity and difference, as it might initially suggest, but to the privileging of the singularity of a certain form of human life: There is something unique [in the European form of life] that is recognized in us by all other human groups, too, something that, quite apart from all considerations of utility, becomes a motive for them to Europeanize themselves even in their unbroken will to spiritual self-preservation; whereas we, if we understand ourselves properly, would never Indianize ourselves, for example.84

The relationship between Europe and non-Europe is a one-way street in which the singularity of Europe is its universal and infinite scope, which the nonEuropean can join and become a branch of as Husserl mentioned of Japan in the early 1920s, as opposed to the particular and finite scope of the myriad cultures and peoples in non-Europe. To this extent Husserl ought not to be categorized as a racial thinker, since other peoples can ideally become part of the European project; yet he remains—at least passively if not actively— beholden to an ethnocentric colonial-cosmopolitan idea to the degree that some peoples are perceived to be present in while being excluded from the essence of Europe (e.g., the wandering “gypsies”) and others (e.g., the Japanese) are in need of Westernization in order to discover their genuine humanity. Husserl’s

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obsession with the “European crisis” obscures his vision of the global crisis of humanity; there is a lack of any comprehension of (as thematized in Chapter 2) the suffering and paradoxes of modernization and Westernization in the nonWestern colonial and semicolonial world. Husserl explicates his “obscure feeling” of European unity and superiority in its infinite aspirations toward the ideal as being underwritten by an intrinsic and immanent teleological historical development of “our European civilization which holds sway throughout all the changing shapes of Europe and accords to them the sense of a development toward an ideal shape of life and being as an eternal pole.”85

Husserl and his others Franz Rosenzweig stated in a letter to the art historian Rudolf Hallo (1896– 1933) from 1922—in response to the idea of recognizing the wisdom and piety of the “old Orientals”—that: “When we [Europeans] know China, we do not become Chinese. But when the Chinese attempt to know Europe as intensively as we attempt to know China, they become European.”86 Regardless of how wise or pious the Buddha or Rabindranath Tagore might be, world history travels exclusively from Christianity to the world, and not vice versa according to Rosenzweig, when Tagore came to visit the West.87 Husserl asserted the same thesis in more secular terms in the Crisis: the Indian or Chinese person can become European, but the European cannot genuinely become Indian or Chinese.88 According to Rosenzweig and Husserl, there is progress in one direction represented by Judeo-Christian (Rosenzweig) or theoretical-scientific (Husserl) Europe. They are both beholden to the Hegelian tradition, discussed in Chapter 1, which offers developmental histories of progress from antiquity to modernity oriented toward an ideal that is realizable solely in the Occident. Other peoples enter into the universal by becoming European, while Europeans would only lose themselves by becoming Chinese or Indian. What is the justification of this difference in kind between different members of humanity? “China” or “India” signify mere empirical anthropological types, according to Husserl, while “Europe” (as the ideal) is in fact not “Europe” (as fallen in nationalist ideologies).89 Culture—whether European or not—untouched by science consists of finite tasks and accomplishments: “The openly endless horizon in which he

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lives is not disclosed; his ends, his activity, his trade and traffic, his personal, social, national, and mythical motivation—all this moves within the sphere of his finitely surveyable surrounding world.”90 Europe embodies a teleologically driven progress toward the infinite that breaks with tasks that are merely finite, particular, and practical.91 Europe names an infinite and universal horizon that is the proper sense of world history, and its idea is higher than any particular anthropological culture, including the corroded particularities of existing European nations that have lost touch with the scientific spirit and are in desperate need of renewal through reconnecting with the genuine cosmopolitan telos and idea of Europe in the West’s internal dialogue with itself.92 There is one common humanity in which the European conception of humanity is privileged insofar as it alone actively posits common universal humanity.93 Husserl asserts in this context that “even the Papuan is a man and not a beast. He has his ends and he acts reflectively, considering the practical possibilities. The works and methods that grow [out of this] go to make up a tradition, being understandable again [by others] in virtue of their rationality.”94 Husserl admits that there is a rationality to the Papuan lifeworld that is traditional, practical, and also reflective to a degree. This insight could be used to discover a plurality of rational forms of life and forms of philosophizing, as considered in the discussion of Misch in Chapter 5, or it could help decenter the absolute privileging of the European lifeworld and European reason as a new and radically distinct stage of life. Husserl, however, does not take either such route: But just as man and even the Papuan represent a new stage of animal nature, i.e., as opposed to the beast, so philosophical reason represents a new stage of human nature and its reason. But the stage of human existence [under] ideal norms for infinite tasks, the stage of existence sub specie aeterni, is possible only through absolute universality, precisely the universality contained from the start in the idea of philosophy.95

There is no space in Husserl’s space of reason for the Papuan as Papuan or for a Papuan form of reflection and philosophizing. Just as Husserl contended that naturalism relativized rationality and opened the paths of irrationality, Husserl’s own conception establishes an overly narrow standard and measure of reason that excludes most of humanity in its diversity from rationality and thereby makes it irrational despite the reality that every lifeworld relies on its own modes of communicative reproduction and therefore contains possibilities of self-reflection and argumentation.

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Decolonizing the lifeworld Husserl’s idealizing teleological narrative concerning Europe is not merely a historical curiosity. In the face of the contrary evidence from diverse lifeworlds and philosophical traditions, Husserl’s thesis that Europe (in the infinity and universality of its idea) alone is genuinely infinite and universal continues to function as a presupposition of institutionalized academic philosophy and has found contemporary advocates and defenders.96 A decolonized phenomenology and hermeneutics is needed in response to this situation; a phenomenology of the lifeworld that would recognize the intrinsic plurality of lifeworlds, of the overlapping intersection and diversity of home and alien worlds, and universal aspirations that are perceived as possibilities in a plurality of human cultures and lifeworld rather than being exclusively identified with the European ideal. The provincialization of the European lifeworld and European rationality, insofar as one can even speak of one reason at all, would release Europe and the West from its burden of representing all of humanity in the infinity of its tasks and aspirations and Europe would thereby retain its own uniqueness as one local structurally and intersubjectively changing configuration among others. While “Europe” represents the universal, and thereby ethnocentrically signifies what transcends ethnocentric particularity, the word “China” represents the foreign, the strange, and the mysterious particularity in Husserl’s corpus. “China” is frequently deployed in Husserl’s examples as a cipher for what is “alien” and “other” to the European, belying its supposed universality. Given a plurality of distinctive forms of life, how can different forms of historical intersubjectivity enter into communication with and understand one another? Husserl had difficulty answering this question even with his ideal of humanity embodied in Europe. But there are indications of more appropriate answers, and a route to contesting Husserl’s ethnocentric moments and articulating a more adequate intercultural hermeneutics, in reconsidering Husserl’s thinking of horizons and his analyses of the lifeworld as a plurality of overlapping yet irreducible selfworld/otherworld or homeworld/alienworld.97 The problem of interpreting a distant other removed across time and space would be the most extreme case of interpreting the other who one meets in ordinary life. Cairns mentioned in his conversations with Husserl this problem in the following way: “Through coming in contact with another historical intersubjectivity, as when, e.g. two races with no past connections (perhaps— though probably not exactly—Europe and China?) come together making a common intersubjectivity with two separate pasts.”98 Husserl is closer to

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Driesch’s position examined in Chapter 2 on this matter in this passage, namely that interaction leads to the formation of a new intersubjectivity in which the participants retain distinct pasts and life-histories in communicating with one another. The concept of the formation of new intersubjectivities indicates how Husserl’s works can have Eurocentric elements in the presentation of his cosmopolitan humanist vision while being opposed to nationalist, racialist, and other forms of particularist ideology. There is no difference in essence or kind between cultures and lifeworlds that would prevent individuals and groups from forming new communities and associations. The development of new intersubjective relationships happen all the time with the formation of new associations, friendships, and romances in which there are inevitably asymmetries, miscommunications, and misinterpretations between members of different lifeworlds or—as many of us have no doubt experienced—even participants in the “same” lifeworld or social-historical form of life. Husserl recognized the communicative structure of rationality in the lifeworld. It is the condition of the emergence of philosophy in the ancient Greek case when he stated that the philosophical “movement proceeds from the beginning in a communicative way, awakens a new style of personal existence in one’s sphere of life, a correspondingly new becoming through communicative understanding.”99 However, as Misch demonstrated, movements of communication, reflection, and personal determinations and styles of existence are found throughout a variety of cultures and are not limited to one lineage stemming from classical Greece. Thinking through the consequences of Husserl’s plural conception of lifeworlds in relation to Misch’s pluralistic conception of philosophy, which allows for multiple origins, indicates ways of decentering, opening up, and pluralizing Husserl’s Grecocentric definition of philosophy. To introduce a more Habermasian interpretation of the lifeworld at this juncture, these tendencies toward reflection and critique can appear and be taken up in any lifeworld or cultural milieu insofar as they are possibilities of the communicative structure of a lifeworld as such.100 That is to say, by rejecting Husserl’s idolization of Europe as the exclusive standard of reason, it becomes evident that no lifeworld qua lifeworld is too “primitive” or “other” to not encompass its own forms of communicative understanding and interpretation that have their own intrinsic capacities and potential for self-reflection and self-transformation. There is no satisfactory justification for projecting an abyss or unbridgeable gap between diverse humans, exoticizing other persons as wholly and

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incomprehensibly other. There is likewise no legitimate rationale for the monistic reduction of the diversity of forms of social-historical life and communication to the uniformity and unity of one cultural horizon manifest in the discourse about Europe in Husserl and classical phenomenology. Husserl himself rejected an overinflated misguided conception of reason, noting: “I too am certain that the European crisis has its roots in a misguided rationalism. But we must not take this to mean that rationality as such is evil or that it is of only subordinate significance for humanity’s existence as a whole.”101 Husserl’s inflationary interpretation of reason in history and its intrinsically Greek-European character is part of this misguided rationalism. Husserl’s philosophy or origins conceals and excludes, more than it discloses, the rationalities operative in each historical form of life and communication by overemphasizing the Greek origin of philosophy and the role of the theoretical attitude. The alternative, articulated by Misch and others, need not entail the irrationalism or skepticism feared by Husserl; there can be minimalistic conceptions of philosophy and rationality elucidated from the asymmetrical and reciprocal dynamics of intersubjective communication and dialogue. The Crisis is in one sense Husserl’s worst and best work. It develops his notion of lifeworld and his analysis of the priority to the lifeworld in the formation and ongoing practical orientation of reflective and theoretical discourses. However, the primacy of the lifeworld is problematically linked with an unphenomenological and questionable developmental-teleological and Eurocentric conception of history. If the phenomenological analysis of the lifeworld and the speculative philosophy of history and culture can be decoupled, a more adequate conception of intercultural philosophy and hermeneutics can be articulated in relation to Husserl’s philosophical project. The phenomenological tradition offers a significant perspective missing in the more interculturally oriented thinkers of the 1920s, who were discussed in Chapter 2, despite its undeniable ethnocentric dimensions. While the democratic Driesch and the aristocratic Keyserling, among others, both emphasized and thereby limited the achievement of common cosmopolitan humanity and new fusions of forms of life through the intercultural communication between cultural and intellectual elites, Husserl—and later Habermas—demonstrate how rationality is intrinsically constitutive of the lifeworld through the dynamics of mutual understanding (Husserl) and communicative interaction (Habermas). The way in which Husserl and Habermas go astray in comparison with the more directly intercultural thinking of Driesch and Keyserling is in binding the lifeworld to a Eurocentric conception of rationality and the history of reason,

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which Habermas does through his reliance on Weber’s account of modernization as bureaucratization and instrumental rationalization. Habermas articulated in The Theory of Communicative Action his analysis of “decolonizing the lifeworld,” and its communicative reproduction through processes of intersubjective interaction, from the systematic media of power and wealth that distort it by hindering free communicative interaction and the formation of participatory public spheres.102 Habermas did not proceed far enough in his analysis by not liberating the concept of the lifeworld itself from the primacy of the paradigm of the modern rationalized European form of life. Habermas does not perceive the potential, discussed in Chapter 2 in relation to the works of Zhang Junmai ᔉ৯ࣅ, of multiple Enlightenments and multiple modernities. For the sake of a more adequate conception and practice of interpretation and philosophy, the lifeworld needs to be liberated from a developmental-teleological account of Western rationality, which is part of a fateful Hegelian and Weberian legacy that still shapes how discourses exclude non-Western forms of life and philosophies, and the lifeworld and its rationalities decolonized in an intercultural philosophical discourse of modernity.103

Husserl and the European idea of philosophy The crisis of rationality is simultaneously actualized in the domains of the sciences and in the social historical “life-world.”104 Husserl identified this problematic with the recovery of rationality associated with the origins of scientific and philosophical inquiry into the self and the world in ancient Greece. Philosophy requires for Husserl as much as Heidegger a confrontation with its Greek origin. Encountering and engaging the sources of Indian or Chinese philosophy can at best be an impulse toward encountering one’s own tradition. But what is the necessity of this movement? Why can a Westerner not engage with and be transformed by Buddhist, Papuan, or other forms of worlddisclosure such that horizons are shifted and new forms of intersubjectivity and new philosophical discourses can emerge and be reflectively and dialogically pursued? The expansion and shifting of horizons is in fact more descriptively true of the history of Western philosophy from ancient Greek and medieval encounters with West Asian discourses to the intercultural situation of modern European philosophy, despite the continuing spell of the ideological illusion of the closed and isolated autonomy of the Western philosophical transmission and its claim to be the sole universal and infinite horizon.

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The idea and image of Greece have notoriously exercised an irresistible tyrannical power over the German philosophical and poetic imagination.105 It is not only Husserl’s student Heidegger who romanticized the Greeks and privileged the Greek origins of philosophy. Husserl portrays philosophy as inherently Greek in its origins in that it alone formed a universal disinterested theoretical attitude that served as the basis for the development of philosophy and science in Europe.106 Although there are perhaps transcendental moments in Buddhism, as discussed above, genuine philosophy is defined as uniquely a European event. Husserl was generally familiar with the work of Misch and was undoubtedly aware of his 1926 book The Dawn of Philosophy (Der Weg in die Philosophie) on the multiple origins of philosophy.107 Husserl distinguished traditional from reflective cultures, identifying the latter possibility—in contrast to Misch— exclusively as a European spiritual achievement. A number of passages in Husserl appear to be responding to Misch’s depiction of the multiplicity of philosophical origins, and other positions similar to it. Husserl, for instance, considers an objection to his own position, noting that others maintain that: philosophy, the science of the Greeks, is not something peculiar to them which came into the world for the first time with them. After all, [the Greeks] themselves tell of the wise Egyptians, Babylonians, etc., and did in fact learn much from them. Today we have a plethora of works about Indian philosophy, Chinese philosophy, etc., in which these are placed on a plane with Greek philosophy and are taken as merely different historical forms under one and the same idea of culture.108

Husserl states next in response that he recognizes that there are “common features” between these historical forms of thinking. Nonetheless, such general typological similarities do not entail a sameness of essence or principle: “One must not allow the merely morphologically general features to hide the intentional depths so that one becomes blind to the most essential differences of principle.”109 Husserl is explicitly ethnocentric when he defines human differences as embodying a difference in essence or kind a few pages later. He argues that “Oriental philosophies” cannot be judged equal to Greco-European scientific philosophy, because they have a traditional religious-mythical or merely practical-universal comportment toward the world: within their own framework of meaning this world-view and world-knowledge are and remain mythical and practical, and it is a mistake, a falsification of their sense, for those raised in the scientific ways of thinking created in Greece and developed in the modem period to speak of Indian and Chinese philosophy and

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science (astronomy, mathematics), i.e., to interpret India, Babylonia, China, in a European way.110

As discussed above, Buddhist thought was for Husserl not merely religiousmythical, but it was a practical teaching and is accordingly naturalistic and pre- or proto-theoretical in its orientation. The wisdom of the East is at best comprised of practically oriented wisdom-traditions rather than philosophy—as theory presupposing the theoretical detachment from both mythical thinking and merely practical life-concerns—per se. The highest forms of non-Western thinking are the Indian and Chinese forms of thought in Husserl’s account. These highest exemplars of thinking outside the Occident, using the word “philosophy” only in quotation marks and disregarding Islamic and other forms of philosophical discourse, cannot be compared to the Western philosophical and scientific attitude insofar as their universality is primarily practical-vocational: Before everything else the very attitudes of the two sorts of “philosophers,” their universal directions of interest, are fundamentally different. In both cases one may notice a world-encompassing interest that leads on both sides—thus also in Indian, Chinese, and similar “philosophies”—to universal knowledge of the world, everywhere working itself out as a vocation-like life-interest, leading through understandable motivations to vocational communities in which the general results are propagated or develop from generation to generation.111

Husserl can recognize a kind of universality in other forms of thought; but it is a universality that is hindered by its association with practical life-concerns. This is contrasted with the Greek emancipation of the theoretical study of nature and the self from such practical interests and relational contexts. Husserl identified the primal phenomenon of spiritual Europe with the transformational “breakthrough” of philosophy, which contains all sciences, in Greek antiquity. This interpretation of the idea of philosophy relies on a modern rationalistic reconstruction of classical Greek thought, which was concerned with the order of nature and the best form of living well with practical and vocational concerns in mind. Aristotle distinguished and prioritized living theoretically as the best form of life. This is only one indication of how the pursuit of knowledge and truth for the sake of pure theory was interconnected with a way of experiencing and interpreting practical life. As the 1926 work by Misch significantly illustrated in its own terms, the history of Western philosophy discloses myriad counterexamples to Husserl’s argument from Socratic inquiry into the good life through the Hellenistic quest for tranquility of mind (ataraxia, ἀταραξία) and its rebirth in early modern philosophy to the destructing of the

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theoretical ideal in Hume or Nietzsche. Moments of philosophical decentering, breakthrough, and the emergence of new forms of reflection transcending and reorienting traditional life-situations are manifested for Misch in the works associated with the Buddha and Zhuangzi 㥞ᄤ, among others. Husserl’s position is untenable given how theory and practice are interwoven even as the Western idea of theory for its own sake is privileged in some—yet historically not all—dominant forms of Western philosophy. Furthermore, as considered in the previous section, Husserl’s own philosophical articulation of the plural nature of the lifeworld, as the setting and inspiration of the theoretical attitude to which theory must return in praxis, reveals itself to be at odds with—and, if given a pluralistic interpretation of his own phenomenology, can be interpreted as being inconsistent with—his portrayal of the autonomy and isolation of Western philosophy. Husserl’s call for new forms of praxis arising from theory, which would promote critical “universal” reflection on all forms of life and life-goals in the present, would benefit from moving beyond the limiting idea of Europe—no matter how universally it is understood—and a reconsideration and opening up of the idea of philosophy itself.112 This strategy would allow it to oppose and freely operate beyond nationalist and ethnocentric formations of life and also the Eurocentric self-undermining of universal aspirations for more expansive and inclusive forms of communication and intersubjectivity. Husserl posed the question to himself, recalling the language of his Logos article, whether the dream of “philosophy as science, as serious, rigorous, indeed apodictically rigorous science” has ended.113 It is not, but it is in danger. Showing once again the universal aspirational dimension of his understanding of the idea of Europe, which functions as a sort of Kantian orientational idea as Derrida notes, Husserl concluded: There are only two escapes from the crisis of European existence: the downfall of Europe in its estrangement from its own rational sense of life, its fall into hostility toward the spirit and into barbarity, or the rebirth of Europe from the spirit of philosophy through a heroism of reason that overcomes naturalism once and for all. Europe’s greatest danger is weariness. If we struggle against this greatest of all dangers as “Good Europeans” with the sort of courage that does not fear even an infinite struggle, then out of the destructive blaze of lack of faith, the smoldering fire of despair over the West’s mission for humanity, the ashes of great weariness, will rise up the phoenix of a new life-inwardness and spiritualization as the pledge of a great and distant future for humanity: for the spirit alone is immortal.114

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Part Three: Heidegger, Europe, and the Question of Asia The Occidental essence of philosophy and the crisis of the Occident Jacques Derrida argued that there is a common language and logic running through the discourse of spirit (Geist) and Europe in Husserl and Heidegger in the 1930s, noting how “this reference to spirit, and to Europe, is no more an external or accidental ornament for Husserl’s thought than it is for Heidegger’s. It plays a major, organizing role in the transcendental teleology of reason as Europocentric humanism.”115 “Europe” expresses an eidetic unity. It is not to be construed here in a worldly cartographical, geographical, or territorial sense; it is defined in a “spiritual” sense in this discourse, in which the very “unity” of Europe and Western philosophy is at stake.116 Derrida comments further how this conception of Europe as a philosophical idea is bound to a historical-teleological order: “The teleological axis of this discourse has become the tradition of European modernity. One encounters it again and again, intact and invariable throughout variations as serious as those that distinguish Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, and Valery.”117 The Eurocentriccosmopolitan politics of these great European “spirits” is, according to Derrida, “less innocent than often believed.”118 Derrida’s interpretation of the operation of the language of spirit in the discourses of Husserl and Heidegger raises significant issues in the context of the question concerning intercultural philosophy: is there a significant difference between the idea of Europe—and potential Eurocentrism—in Husserl (who is oriented toward universality, rationality, and cosmopolitan humanity) and in Heidegger (who is a critic of Husserl’s rationalistic language and project)? To what extent do Husserl’s and Heidegger’s conceptions of philosophy, its exclusively Greek-born and European history, and Europe cohere and belong together? Heidegger in his 1935 lecture-course Introduction to Metaphysics, composed in the context of his recent period of public active support for the National Socialist regime (1933–1935) that he hoped would renew German cultural and social-political life, asked whether the question of the sense and meaning of being was intrinsically interconnected with the question and potential decision concerning the fate of Europe. The question of being, Heidegger remarked, is: “a question, the question: Is ‘being’ a mere word [ein blosses Wort] and its meaning a vapor or is it the spiritual fate [geistige Schicksal] of the West?”119

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How was it that the question of being (die Seinsfrage), which was primarily directed at individual existence in Being and Time (1927), had become an issue of the character and destiny of Europe and the West in 1935? The question of being is the question of its concealment/unconcealment in the history of Western metaphysics. Heidegger posed this 1935 version of the “fundamental question of being” in the context of his articulation of “this Europe.” Which Europe is this? It is one in the middle trapped between Russia and America—that is, “Europe” signifies “Germany” in this and many other contexts in Heidegger—which “seen metaphysically, are both the same: the same hopeless frenzy of unchained technology and the rootless organization of the average human being.”120 What is the spiritual crisis of technological modernity represented by America and Russia? It consists of the collapse of the fourfold (das Geviert): “the darkening of the world, the flight of the gods, the destruction of the earth, the reduction of human beings into a mass, the hatred of everything creative and free.”121 Heidegger’s critique of technological modernity is developed in the 1930s as the culmination of the history of Western metaphysics as the “forgetting of being.” This forgetfulness of what is essential is a key theme throughout Heidegger’s mid and later philosophy. In Introduction to Metaphysics, the critique occurs in the context of Heidegger’s increasingly ambivalent relationship with National Socialism, with which he had problems but did not decisively break during this period. The question of being is a query into the very essence of the Occident. Yet, although he speaks of Europe, it is primarily a question of Germany. It is the German people (Volk), as the “metaphysical” people, who are called to spiritually renew and reshape Europe: “We lie in the pincers. Our people, standing in the center, suffers the most intense pressure—our people, the people richest in neighbors and hence the most endangered people, and for all that, the most metaphysical people.”122 It has been claimed that Heidegger’s discourse of the first and other beginning could refer to Western and non-Western beginnings. Heidegger’s mentioning of “few other great beginnings” in a 1959 lecture “Hölderlin’s Earth and Heaven” is tactically deployed to justify Heidegger’s openness toward non-Western forms of thinking.123 Heidegger remarked here that: In its essential beginning, which can never be lost, the present planetaryinterstellar world condition is thoroughly European-Occidental-Grecian. However, the supposition reflects on this: What changes can do so only out of the reserved greatness of its beginning. Accordingly, the present world condition

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can receive an essential change or, for that matter, preparation for it, only from its beginning, which fatefully determines our age. It is the great beginning. There is, of course, no return to it. The great beginning becomes present, as that which awaits us, only in its coming to the humble. But the humble can no longer abide in its Occidental isolation. It is opening itself up to those few other great beginnings which, with their own character, belong in the sameness of the beginning of the infinite relation in which the earth is contained.124

The context makes it sufficiently evident that the few other beginnings mentioned in this passage refer to forms of non-Occidental beginnings. Nonetheless, given Heidegger’s other statements about great beginnings (ones that occur through great artists, poets, and statesmen) and the beginning of philosophy, of which there can only be one, it is clear that the Greek beginning is the privileged beginning. Furthermore, Heidegger repeatedly states that the first and other beginning of philosophy is an essentially Occidental concern even as it has been globalized in the modern technological epoch. There is a social-political context to Heidegger’s thinking of the first and other beginning, as the first Greek and the other German beginning, in the early National Socialist period, which later—with his growing disillusionment with the possibility of a new political beginning in Germany—becomes the first Greek and other Occidental beginning. Heidegger stated in the charged atmosphere of 1933 the affinity between the Greek and German beginning, in which the political mirrors the philosophical realm: National Socialism is not some doctrine, but the transformation from the bottom up of the German world—and, as we believe, of the European world too. This beginning of a great history of a people, such as we see among the Greeks, extends to all the dimensions of human creativity. With this beginning, things come into openness and truth.125

Likewise, Heidegger identified Germany with the possibility of the (renewed) commencement of the West in a remark in 1942: “We know today that the Anglo-Saxon world of Americanism has resolved to annihilate Europe, that is, the homeland [Heimat], and that means: the commencement of the Western world.”126 The relation between the first and the other beginning signifies in 1935: “To ask: how does it stand with Being?—this means nothing less than to repeat and retrieve (wiederholen) the inception of our historical-spiritual Dasein, in order to transform it into the other inception.”127 The philosophical

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beginning and the political beginning of a people, which he associated with the great statesman, are here still intertwined in Heidegger’s thinking. The first beginning of philosophy is consequently only the Greek beginning, the orginary questioning of being in all its perplexity and wonder. The other beginning is “our” (Heidegger means the German people with this “we”) retrieval and renewal of the question only in relation to the first Greek beginning. This idea appears as the social-political possibility of a people for Heidegger from 1933–1935 and is subsequently increasingly associated with the beginning of philosophy in distinction from the beginnings initiated and established through the great artists, poets, and politicians articulated in the “Origin of the Work of Art.”128 Technology and globalization are pathologies of the culmination of the history of Western metaphysics in Heidegger’s mature thinking. The question of technology and its planetary character is rooted in the history of Western metaphysics through which it needs to be addressed. The decisive answer thus requires a confrontation with this history and the first Greek beginning. The language of decision and destiny in response to the Occidental-Western and now planetary or globalized character of modern technology continues into Heidegger’s later writings such that there is a definite continuity between his thinking in the 1930s and his later thought. Heidegger comments in 1962: “This confrontation is for us today—in an entirely different way and to a greater extent—the decision about the destiny of Europe and what is called the Western world. Insofar, however, as the entire earth—and not only the earth anymore.”129 Heidegger clarifies this statement elsewhere, where he remarks how (as Husserl likewise did) the “Occidental” is not only geographical but is essentially world-historical: even if there are “ancient cultures” in China and India, they are now part of the Occidental history of being and its forgetting from metaphysics to modern technological civilization, which has become the fate of the entire planet.130 To this extent, the return to Chinese and Indian beginnings are not relevant even in China or India; they too must confront the Greek beginning to encounter another beginning in confronting the existential destructiveness of modern technological civilization. China and India, the two primary examples of other cultures for Husserl and Heidegger, lack the beginnings of philosophy and thus the historical situation that would enable them to confront technological civilization that now shapes their lifeworlds. Heidegger maintained that philosophy can have only one essence and it is Greek:

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The often heard expression “Western-European philosophy” is, in truth, a tautology […] The word philosophia appears […] on the birth certificate of our own history; we may even say on the birth certificate of the contemporary epoch of world history which is called the atomic age. That is why we can ask the question, “What is philosophy?” only if we enter into a discussion with the thinking of the Greek world. But not only what is in question—philosophy—is Greek in origin, but how we question, the manner in which we question even today, is Greek.131

Likewise, according to Heidegger, once again: “The statement that philosophy is in its nature Greek says nothing more than that the West and Europe, and only these, are, in the innermost course of their history, originally ‘philosophical.’” Heidegger continues, echoing his teacher Husserl on this point: “This is attested by the rise and dominance of the sciences.”132 Heidegger asserted further that there is only one essential style of philosophy— being and its forgetting in beings: “The style of all Western-European philosophy—and there is no other, neither a Chinese nor an Indian—is determined from the twofold, ‘beings-being.’”133 Is non-Western thinking in a sense superior to Western philosophy insofar as it is free of the problematic of metaphysics and technology? Is there a valorization in Heidegger of the non-metaphysical thinking and poetic wisdom of the East, as when Heidegger praises Daoism or contrasts the dignity of Thai traditional culture and the horrors of Americanism in his 1963 conversation with the Thai Professor and Buddhist monk Bhikkhu Maha Mani? Or does such exteriority to the history of metaphysics and Western philosophy embody an Orientalist exclusion of the East and non-West from both the fundamental problematic and the possibility of responding to it? Do the radical decentering critiques of Western metaphysics in thinkers such as Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida, and Rorty continue in fact to privilege it by retaining its centrality even if in a negative form? Is decentering the West without confronting and encountering its others still indeed in the end a centering around the West?

Heidegger and the im/possibility of intercultural dialogue Heidegger articulated in his 1937 essay “Ways of Speaking” (“Wege zur Aussprache”) the interpretive confrontation (verstehende Auseinandersetzung) occurring in the relationship between self and other in the context of a discussion of the possibility of mutual understanding between French and Germans.134 Heidegger elucidates in this short text the notion of verstehende

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Auseinandersetzung that is simultaneously a coming-to-mutual-understanding (verstehen) of one another as well as a differentiating setting-apart-from-eachother (Auseinandersetzung). Heidegger focuses in this context on the question of the encounter with and recognition and understanding of the other, an encounter that in its mutuality cannot subsume or repress the difference between self and other. Thus the encounter is interpreted as a kind of conflict (Streit) and differentiation of self and other in which, as with Husserl’s interpretation of the Western encounter with Buddhism, the self comes to an understanding of its ownness. It is portrayed as strife not for the sake of strife or violence but, Heidegger claimed, precisely for the sake of understanding the other as an another to myself and for understanding and becoming myself. Heidegger’s “A Dialogue on Language: Between a Japanese and an Inquirer” (1959) enacts what is described in “Ways of Speaking.” It reports of a conversation that occurs between a German thinker (Heidegger) and a Japanese visitor about intercultural understanding. In particular, it focuses on the translatability of the Japanese word “iki” (ǙǢ or ㉟) into Western languages. The expression iki was explored by Kuki Shūzō б儐਼䗴 in his 1930 work The Structure of “Iki” ( NjǙき」ȃᾟ䗴, “Iki” no kōzō). Kuki was an important figure for Heidegger. He was his student in Freiburg and published one of the first book lengths studies of Heidegger in 1933: The Philosophy of Heidegger (Haideggā no tetsugaku ɗȬ ɏɋȴόȃ૆ᄺ). This literary dialogue modifies factual details and the structure of the conversation between Heidegger and Tezuka Tomio ᠟ฮᆠ䲘 (1903–1983), a professor of German literature at Tokyo University, on which the dialogue was loosely based. Tezuka indicated in his essay “An Hour with Heidegger” that Heidegger’s dialogue did not represent him well and that he found it one-sided and forced. Tezuka was, he reported, more interested in discussing German literature and the relationship between Christianity and European civilization than in the encounter between the Occident and the Orient.135 The dialogue has been portrayed as expressing Heidegger’s humility, hesitation, and respect in Asian philosophies. He shows a healthy suspicion and reluctance to use Western concepts to clarify or explain Eastern and Japanese experiences and expressions. It has been accordingly maintained that this dialogue reveals possibilities for genuine encounter and dialogue between thinkers from East and West. One must consider, however, whether this hesitation is in fact humility and deference or is it in fact a denial and distancing of the claims that Eastern

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thought can make upon Western thinkers. According to Heidegger, iki cannot be translated into Western languages. Heidegger criticizes Kuki for being untrue to the Japanese experience by employing Western phenomenology and aesthetics to clarify iki, thereby reducing it to an aesthetic phenomenon: “The name ‘aesthetics’ and what it names grow out of European thinking, out of philosophy. Consequently, aesthetic consideration must ultimately remain alien to East Asian thinking.”136 While Kuki’s work involves the recognition of the intercultural and intertextual “hybrid” character of contemporary philosophizing, in which phenomenology and Zen Buddhism are already discursively and intertextually intertwined, Heidegger insists on their distinctiveness and incommensurability, presupposing an underlying essence or identity that refuses to be communicated and transformed through communicative encounters and exchange. There are three questions that should be posed to Heidegger’s dialogue that point toward its tensions: (1) Why insist on the untranslatability of basic words such as Chinese dao 䘧, Japanese iki, Greek logos? Is Heidegger not in fact already translating them into his own discourse when he leaves them “untranslated”? (2) Why ask if it is necessary and rightful for East Asians to apply Western concepts to Japanese experience given his own account of how the global planetary character of the West has been imposed upon the East? What is left of Eastern origins outside of planetary modernity? (3) Why call for anticipating and preparing for a dialogue between East and West while hesitating before the task of engaging in and undertaking it and intimating the fact of its impossibility? Does this open toward or turn away from encountering and engaging in dialogue with the other? Basic fundamental world-disclosing words such as dao, iki, logos, and no doubt Heidegger’s own primordial words such as Ereignis and Sein are in some sense untranslatable. Heidegger reveals in the course of the dialogue with his Japanese interlocutor not only the incapacity of the West to interpret the East, but the East to interpret the West. Genuine dialogue is “anticipated” in the dialogue; it does not and in principle cannot occur. There is accordingly an implicit difference in essence or kind between the West and the East that prevents genuine mutual dialogue, exchange, and understanding from happening as ongoing communicative interaction and mutual transformation. Do Heidegger’s essays about dialogue from 1937 and 1959 offer an exemplar or model for intercultural dialogue and interpreting the relationship between East and West? The answer is both yes and no: (1) yes, insofar as Heidegger opens up ways of speaking together; (2) no, to the extent that Heidegger’s accounts of the history of philosophy and the idea of philosophy limit possibilities of encounter

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and dialogue; (3) yes, to the degree that Heidegger calls for hesitation and care in entering into dialogue with others and coercively presupposing that all others can be understood and comprehended from one’s own perspective and all discourses translated into one’s own purportedly universal discourse; (4) no, insofar as this hesitancy and the reduction of intercultural dialogue to an anticipated point in a distant future can prevent encounters and dialogical communication from occurring, and by reifying difference by presupposing a difference in essence or kind between the East and the West that blocks genuine communication. This yes and no indicates both the promise and the danger of Heidegger’s thinking. Heidegger’s dialogue with a Japanese visitor is a dialogue that is not primarily about communication in the end; it is about silence, the mystery of language through which being addresses mortal humans, and an intrinsic ineffability that communication, including intercultural dialogue, cannot cross. The text of the Zhuangzi, as proposed in Chapter 5, has already intimated an alternative strategy for interpreting as well as potentially transforming and transerversing such fixed perspectives and horizons through its elucidation of radical alterity and non-identity.

Conclusion Heidegger’s thinking of communication and silence is suggestive, as will be considered in Chapter 8 concerning language and nothingness, yet it is insufficiently radically dialogical for intercultural philosophy and hermeneutics. Language is conditioned by non-language and silence, but the other can speak and be asked in an unfolding communicative interaction. Intercultural hermeneutics need not choose according to a false dilemma, posited by interpreters of Heidegger’s portrait of the Japanese as incomprehensibly “wholly other,” between either identity and comprehensibility or alterity and ineffability. This choice is a false dilemma given that intercultural interaction and exchanges have already long been underway, including in the Greek origins of philosophy and in Heidegger’s interactions with his Asian interlocutors. Although unrecognized by Husserl and Heidegger in their definitions of the essence of philosophy, the communicative openness of philosophy is recognized by no less than Plato in the dialogue Symposium. According to Socrates’s own narrative in his speech on love, the true originator of the art and practice of philosophy is not the Greek male Socrates. Philosophy, as the art of the love of wisdom and as giving birth to new ideas in dialogue and interaction with others,

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was taught to Socrates by Diotima of Mantinea. Diotima is a prophetess and seer who impregnated Socrates with the foreign wisdom of love and insight into the art of loving wisdom. The openness and receptivity of philosophy to the East, as a teacher of the art and practice of philosophy itself, is inscribed in procreative language in one of philosophy’s fundamental origin stories. A further reason for the deceptiveness of this dilemma is the hermeneutical character of language. The art of intercultural hermeneutics is an interpretive task that can presuppose neither complete comprehensibility nor incomprehensibility. Communication and interpretation are, as Schleiermacher recognized in his hermeneutics, inexorably constantly needed in everyday and specialized discourses. Hermeneutics is defined by Schleiermacher as a doctrine of art (Kunstlehre) that is oriented by the idea of understanding given the reality of misunderstanding produced by hastiness and prejudice.137 Misinterpretation is not the exception but the ordinary condition of communication, such that understanding must be pursued and cultivated to be achieved. Schleiermacher distinguishes the more lax practice of hermeneutics that presupposes understanding to be automatic and misunderstanding to be the exception from the “more strict practice” that “assumes that misunderstanding results as a matter of course and that understanding must be desired and sought at every point.”138 The fundamental facticity of language indicated in Schleiermacher’s remarks entails that communication can never liberate itself from and must constantly encounter and confront miscommunication and misunderstanding. Even if the exchanges between “Eastern” and “Western” discourses were predominantly a history of misinterpretation, Eastern and Western thinkers and texts were and are already—as have been recurrently illustrated throughout this work— interculturally and intertextually intertwined. This chapter has shown how phenomenology ought not to be interpreted as intrinsically Eurocentric despite the multiple non-trivial Eurocentric moments in two of its most prominent practitioners. The intercultural significance of the works of Husserl and Heidegger should not be disregarded either even while the ethnocentrism of their philosophies of history, their prejudices, and notorious political commitments in the case of Heidegger, deserve to be radically critiqued and clarified for the sake of articulating a more adequate (i.e., less ethnocentric and more intercultural) conception and practice of phenomenology.

7

Encounter, Dialogue, and Learning: Martin Buber and Zen Buddhism

Introduction This chapter examines the marginalization of Zen (⽾, Ch. Chan; Jp. Zen) Buddhism in Western philosophy during the middle of the twentieth-century and elucidates how Martin Buber’s approach to Zen is partial yet significant and suggestive for a more appropriate intercultural hermeneutics and conception of philosophy. Buber’s recognition of the dialogical and ethical dimensions of Zen Buddhism diverge from stereotypical Western views of Zen awakening while requiring us to go further than Buber’s portrayal to arrive at a better understanding of Zen as exhibiting its own transformative dialogical ethos of encounter, dialogue, and learning. Buber was trained in the discipline of philosophy, and his primary works are in the philosophy of language, philosophy of religion, and ethics. He wrote extensively on Judaism and comparative religion. Buber belongs to a select group of modern Western philosophers, including Leibniz and Misch, who argued for a hermeneutical openness toward non-European forms of thought. Leibniz, Misch, and Buber explicitly asserted that the West can and is indeed in need of learning from the East. There is neither a fundamental incomprehensible abyss between two monolithic realities with their own substantialized identities, an East and West that can never meet nor interact but only be anticipated (the Heideggerian model), nor the presupposition of the intrinsic Western preeminence in that which can be taught and learned (the Hegelian model). Leibniz (albeit in an earlier form), Misch, and Buber recognized and did not deny the uniqueness of the development of scientific rationality and technology in Western civilization; the achievements of Western reason did not lead them to leap to the conclusion that only the West has a fully developed rationality. This thesis is not limited to its most prominent proponents such as Hegel, Weber, and

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Husserl; it is also at work in twentieth-century Western critics, such as Arthur Koestler and Sidney Hook, who endeavored to exclude Zen Buddhism from Western culture and philosophy as a mere consumeristic fad or as a threatening nihilistic “Oriental” menace. These features of Buber’s writings about East Asian philosophy and religion, the region that is the orienting focus of this work, are however insufficient on their own; more is required for an adequate intercultural hermeneutics than interpretive openness and readiness to communicate and learn. Still, Buber’s approach to interpretation, if not always his execution given the conditions of his understanding of East Asian sources and realities, is a gust of fresh air and an inspiration given the characteristic monotonous Eurocentrism of modern Western philosophy, which the present book has sought to contest in a historical way, and it points toward the prospect of a more adequate intercultural art of interpretation and thinking. While it was Confucian China that could teach the West through an “exchange of light” (“car c’est un commerce delumière”) in Leibniz’s writings on China, it was the notion of “non-doing” (wuwei ⛵⠆) in his early writings on Daoism and China that could reorient the West for Buber by indicating an alternative vision to the restless activism and consumption of modern technological civilization.1 This was Buber’s position during the first few decades of the twentieth-century. His later writings concerning East Asian philosophy and religion continue to advocate openness to learning while being more reserved in appreciating their content and structure.2 There are a number of questions we ought to consider here: What kind of learning is called for here in the claim that the West should learn from the East? Does it mean that one must adopt a Daoist or other Eastern philosophy? Can the sensibility revealed in Daoist and Zen Buddhist sources help answer the problem of technological modernity posed by Buber and Heidegger discussed in Chapter 4? Such questions find further clarification in the references to Zen Buddhism that Buber and Heidegger made in the 1950s and 1960s. It should be noted that Daoism and Zen Buddhism are not carefully enough distinguished from one another in Buber’s and Heidegger’s remarks. Their responses to these traditions shed further light on the affinities and distances between Heidegger and Buber in how they encounter East Asian thought and culture: Heidegger focused on experiences of the Way, emptiness (die Leere), the gathering of heaven and earth, and responsive letting be, and Buber emphasized the paradox, the image, and the teaching in narrative language as well as in the dialogical encounter and learning between “I and Thou” in Daoist and Zen Buddhist sources.

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Buber’s dialogue with Zen is more extensive than that of Heidegger. We will return to Heidegger in Chapter 8 and focus on Buber’s encounter in the current chapter, in which we will consider how Buber called for a dialogue with and learning from Zen Buddhism in the postwar years. He elucidated his dialogue with Zen from the perspective of his understanding of Hasidic Judaism and Daoism: “In many formulations of Zen we can see the influence of Daoistic teaching, that truth is above antithetics.”3 In addition to identifying a specific kind of anti-conceptual dialectic at play in both Daoism and Zen, Buber clarified the skeptical understanding of reality as dream in Zen through Zhuangzi’s dream of the butterfly or the butterfly’s dream of Zhuangzi.4

Part One: Buber and the Western Reception of Zen Buddhism The marginalization of Zen Buddhism in Western philosophy Despite Heidegger’s attention to and appropriation of Daoist and Zen Buddhist texts and their language, and his occasional comments about “other great beginnings” and his interest in Zen and praise for Daisetsu Suzuki, he expressed skepticism concerning whether the West could in fact learn from the East. Heidegger emphasized the necessity of now globalized Western metaphysics confronting its own Greek origin and destiny (what he earlier called “the first beginning”) in order to respond to the reductive technological enframing of the world (and disclose “the other beginning” concealed in the first): I am convinced that a change can only be prepared from the same place in the world where the modern technological world originated. It cannot come about by the adoption of Zen Buddhism or other Eastern experiences of the world. The help of the European tradition and a new appropriation of that tradition are needed for a change in thinking. Thinking will only be transformed by a thinking that has the same origin and destiny. [Western technological modernity] must be superseded (aufgehoben) in the Hegelian sense, not removed, superseded, but not by human beings alone.5

Zen might be significant for Japanese in their own self-encounter and it can be fashionable for the West; it cannot resolve the essential questions of the Occidental history of being that demand a European encounter and confrontation with its own origins. Heidegger asserted in a conversation that: “if I understand him [Dr. Suzuki] correctly, this is what I have been trying to say

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in all my writings.” Suzuki, however, advocated recognizing Zen Buddhism as a way of life that is uniquely Japanese and that has a global universal significance that encompasses the West and technological modernity. As we have seen in previous chapters, Heidegger would have appreciated the former tendency in Suzuki more than the latter one indicating a Zen Buddhist response to the problems of technological modernity. Heidegger portrayed how Western technological civilization has become global such that only the confrontation with Greek philosophy has universal significance whether one is European or Asian. This strategy that critiques the history of the West, and which shapes the negative focus on Western philosophy in Derrida and Rorty, has been interpreted as anti-Occidental since the West is the only topos shaped by the malignancy of the history of metaphysics from physis to techne. It is an assertion of the superiority of the West in negative form; the history of metaphysics led to Occidental-technological civilization, and it alone has genuinely universal import as it masters and destroys the earth and sky on a planetary scale. Arguments that the West has historically played a crucial role in the formation and spread of modernity and technology are reasonable except when the crucial role is taken to mean exclusive and in isolation from the global context in which Western and globalized science and technology have emerged. It is less convincing to understand technological modernity only in terms of the West and conclude that the West must be the exclusive site of genuine confrontation and renewal. To contextualize Heidegger’s statement in the “Spiegel Interview” about a potential Zen take-over and its fashionable character, it should be noted that Zen Buddhism was fairly unknown in Germany and the West until it was popularized by translations of the introductory works of Suzuki and collections of Chan and Zen Buddhist literature. It was during the postwar period that Zen became popularized in poetic and countercultural circles and German and other Western philosophers began to respond to its growing influence in the West. Heidegger, however, is known to already have an early interest in Zen Buddhism through the collection Zen, Der Lebendige Buddhismus in Japan: Ausgewählte Stücke des Zen-Textes, which appeared in 1925, and his interaction with visiting Japanese students and intellectuals beginning in the 1920s.6 Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, critical social theorists of the Frankfurt school, expressed anxieties about Eastern influences and, in particular, a facile Western adaptation of Zen Buddhism during the postwar period. Such suspicions are evident in Michel Foucault’s later remarks about the ideological

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character of California style new age spirituality, which superficially adapted from—without contextually understanding—Zen and Tibetan Buddhist styles and practices. Adorno wrote in this spirit in his magnum opus Negative Dialectics of, what he considered to be, the “corny exoticism of such decorative world views as the astonishingly consumable Zen Buddhist one.” These types of irrational and mystical worldviews are restorative rather than critical and transformative. Adorno maintained that they “simulate a thinking posture” and with “nonconceptual vagary,” linking Zen with Heidegger, “heedlessly run off from the subject to the universe, along with the philosophy of Being, are more easily brought into accord with the world’s hardened condition and with the chances of success within it [rather than] the tiniest bit of self-reflection by a subject pondering itself and its real captivity.”7 The appearance of radical freedom and individuality in Zen and the relentless “spiritual materialism” of contemporary spiritual movements corresponds to real unfreedom for Adorno, just as discourses of radical individualism and existential self-individuation reflect the administration of individuals rather than a critical confrontation with it. Zen proves to reaffirm existing society by being yet another consumerist signifier, in exotic Oriental guise, and consumable desire to be satisfied. Zen is similarly understood as a “fashion” by Marcuse.8 Sharing Adorno’s suspicion about hip forms of counter-culture and the function of spirituality in a material culture, Marcuse noted in One Dimensional Man (1964) how Zen has been integrated in the regime of one-dimensional living: The reign of such a one-dimensional reality does not mean that materialism rules, and that the spiritual, metaphysical, and bohemian occupations are petering out. On the contrary, there is a great deal of “Worship together this week,” “Why not try God,” Zen, existentialism, and beat ways of life, etc. But such modes of protest and transcendence are no longer contradictory to the status quo and no longer negative. They are rather the ceremonial part of practical behaviorism, its harmless negation, and are quickly digested by the status quo as part of its healthy diet.9

The suspicions of Adorno and Marcuse are germane to the extent that Zen—and other non-Western traditions from Daoist to Native American—has been appropriated and integrated as a consumer commodity, as can be seen in faddish popular adaptations of Zen in advertising, popular books, knickknacks, standardized architecture, gardens, and technological objects, and even biospiritual practices such as meditation. In the face of such seemingly relentless “spiritual materialism,” there are potential counter-tendencies to the reification

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and alienation involved in grasping attachment, ruthless self-assertion, and the unending stimulation and steering of desires characteristic of media-driven mass consumer societies. Adorno’s remarks are correct to the extent that Zen Buddhism, like all cultural tendencies, can become a producible, exchangeable, and consumable object. Its meditative practices and ethos can be reified and turned into military and managerial techniques of discipline and promoting efficiency. But Adorno did not go far enough in his refection to attend to the complexity and alterity of the phenomenon itself in reducing it to Oriental fantasies and reified popular appropriations.10 There can be no genuine transmission and learning from Zen Buddhist practices and discourses under these circumstances. Adorno, Marcuse, and later Habermas, who dismissed Zen as an apolitical sedative in the late 1960s in Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics, have little concrete to say about Zen or other non-Western forms of thinking, experience, and life.11 The tendency to highlight the seductive dangers of Asia and “Eastern mysticism” is conspicuously expressed in the Anglo-American world in The Lotus and the Robot (1960) by Arthur Koestler (1905–1983). This work is a sequel to his earlier 1945 work, comparing Indian mysticism and communism as forces opposed to individuality, The Yogi and the Commissar. In his 1960 intellectual thought-portrait of the East, based on his travels in India and Japan, Koestler expresses deep anxieties about the threat of the Orient, its very way of life, and its mysticism. These same criticisms and fears are visible earlier in the century in the French conservative and nationalist thinker Henri Massis’s work Défense de l’Occident (1927, published in English as Defence of the West in 1928) that initiated a similar debate about the comparative merits of “Western” and “Eastern” civilization in the late 1920s. Massis and Koestler both identified Soviet Bolshevism and the Orient as the two paramount threats to Western civilization. Koestler’s 1960 work was directed against Zen Buddhism, arguing that Zen, in light of the Pacific War and the Japanese militarism for which it is blamed, is “robotic.” Zen training is a cultish depersonalization of the individual that proves useful for military and social-political discipline and mobilization. Eastern mysticism is in his estimation an internal form of the totalitarian destruction of the individual person analogous to the external form of destruction executed by Stalinism in the Soviet Union.12 American pragmatists such as John Dewey and Charles W. Morris were at the forefront of promoting Eastern and comparative philosophy in the United States, including contributing to founding the journal Philosophy East West.

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Charles W. Morris argued that the theory of semiotics could be used to see the meaningfulness of the language of contradiction and paradox employed in Zen.13 Nonetheless, the pragmatist Sidney Hook (1902–1989), who was called “Dewey’s bulldog” for performing the polemical and ideological dirty work for pragmatism against its perceived rivals and opponents, is more typical of modern Western philosophy’s attitude toward Asian thought that reduces it to premodern irrational mysticism and empty moral platitudes. Hook mocked Koestler’s fears of Asian “traditional philosophies and religion” in a review “But There Was No Light” appearing in the New York Times in 1961. Playing on the idea of light from the East, Hook denied Eastern philosophies—in particular, in this case, Indian Hinduism and Japanese Zen Buddhism—any “light.” He rejected the idea that they have any contemporary significance for modern liberal rational humanity at all to be embraced or feared, asserting: “It is also hard to believe that a politically sophisticated intelligence such as Koestler’s could seriously entertain the notion that ‘Yoga, Zen or any other form of Asian mysticism’ has significant advice for ‘our deadly predicament.’”14 Hook describes Koestler’s work as offering “a devastating critique of Zen Buddhism in which he makes it appear as at best a hilarious leg-pull, an ‘existentialist hoax,’ and at worst, ‘a web of solemn absurdities.’” Hook concludes his review by bemoaning Asians lack of appreciation “of the European contribution to Asia” through colonialism and rejecting Koestler’s pessimism that “the universal values of Western culture will not take in the non-European world.”15 There is in India and Japan, Hook admits, “a commitment to certain moral values as a basis for establishing a world community,” but the modern liberal West has nothing meaningful to learn from these premodern moral teachings from the East. It is the West that will lead and instruct the world into a universal culture of rational humanism and scientific rationality.16 Koestler and Hook are not completely inaccurate. It is historically the case that there is a historical nexus shared by Japanese Zen and Japanese militarism in the first half of the twentieth century. But this complex historical situation should not lead to caricaturizing a long transmission that has multiple diverging tendencies across different East Asian cultures and an ethos and ethical dimension of its own, as explored later in this chapter.17 Notable exceptions to the common tendency to either polemically critique or casually dismiss Zen, expressed in the language of Eurocentric liberal universalism by Koestler and Hook and the critique of capitalist consumerism in Adorno and Marcuse, can be found in the psychologically oriented works of Carl Jung and Erich Fromm who interpret Zen as a vehicle of psychological

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self-transformation and emancipation. Interpreting Zen’s self-description and practices as fundamentally phenomenological, the psychoanalyst Jung proposed in the seminar notes to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra in the second half of the 1930s that: “Zen, the most modern form of Buddhism, is nothing but the education of consciousness, the faculty of realizing things.”18 Fromm, who was also associated with the project of critical social theory and the endeavor to synthesize the works of Marx and Freud for the purposes of a humanistic social critique, responded to Koestler style criticisms of both Marxism and Zen, in this case posed by the sociologist Daniel Bell, rejecting as a clichéd prejudice the idea that: “Zen Buddhism (like other ‘modern tribal and communal philosophies’ of ‘reintegration’) aims ‘at losing one’s sense of self ’ and thus is ultimately antihuman because they [the philosophers of reintegration, including Zen] are anti-individual.”19 Fromm would continue to engage Zen Buddhism as part of the cultural turmoil of the 1960s. Jung was limited in what he could make sense of in Zen Buddhism, despite his earlier statement about the phenomenological character of Zen, and his affirmative stance toward learning and adopting from Eastern works such as The Secret of the Golden Flower (Taiyi Jinhua Zongzhi ໾Э䞥 㧃ᅫᮼ) and the Yijing ᯧ㍧ discussed in Chapter 2. Jung wrote in a letter concerning the two essays that eventually appeared in The Lotus and the Robot that: “I quite agree with Koestler when he puts his finger on the impressive mass of nonsense in Zen.”20 Zen is indeed irrational and intuitive rather than rational and conceptual for Jung, who continues by stating, limiting Koestler’s negative assessment, this is how Zen provides a sense of the whole that Western rationality and science have repressed. The West has turned to yoga and Zen, Jung contends, precisely because of what it has lost and desperately needs. Jung adds: “It is just pathetic to see a man like Herrigel acquiring the art of Zen archery, a nonessential if ever there was one, with the utmost devotion but, thank God, it has obviously nothing to do with the inner life of man!”21 Jung provides a rationale for the contemporary Western interest in Zen, its own pathological condition and fragmented sense of the whole, yet Jung cannot recognize rationality or logic in Zen discourses to any further degree than Koestler or Hook; its “nonsense,” which presupposes an appropriate distinction and measure between sense and nonsense, serves at best as exemplars of the symbolism of the unconscious and intuitive feeling. Zen statements and performances, as will be examined in Chapter 8, are learning situations that exhibit a sense and meaning of their own. They can be interpreted even if their sense cannot be fixated and exhausted due to their transformative decentering

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and reorienting emptying strategies deploying surprise, reversal, play, paradox, dialetheist contradiction, and aporia. There is another philosopher in this period, namely Buber, who disagrees with Zen Buddhism on a number of issues while recognizing its coherence and understandability as a “teaching” (Lehre) that is manifested through a multiplicity of practices and discourses, which appear to make little or no sense from the perspective of the casual (“Western” or “Eastern”) observer. As a teaching, Zen can teach across the boundaries and limits that it puts into play and questions, including the idea of fixed geographical-cultural boundaries of North and South, East and West.

Learning and no-learning in Zen and Jewish personalism The Zen monk paints too, and his importance in the development of East Asiatic art is great. The Hasid cannot paint, but he dances. All this, song, painting, and dance, means expression, and is understood as expression. Silence is not the last.22 The Zen master paints, and notwithstanding Levinas’s remark about dancing discussed below, he does not dance, yet this silence in body and voice is also expressive. While silence is the space of speaking and hearing in Heidegger’s thinking of the nothing, language as expression and dialogue is more complete and perfect in Buber’s philosophy than what he interprets as the monistic mystical silence that is fundamentally non-dialogical. Silence can be expressive, as is the case with the Daoist and Zen Buddhist, but Buber fails to adequately appreciate the dialogical and ethical character of their silence and their expression. Buber portrayed his intellectual development as a transition from mysticism to ethics.23 This transformation, which remained all too incomplete for critics such as Levinas, led to a devaluation of Daoism and Buddhism, which he categorized under the passive side of mysticism. He interpreted Chinese Chan Buddhism as a conglomeration of Buddhism and Daoism that took on Japanese characteristics in Zen Buddhism in his book Hasidism.24 This work offers his most extended portrayal of Zen Buddhism in the context of examining Hasidic Judaism in a comparative perspective with other forms of Judaism, Christianity, and Buddhism. The word “Hasidic” (hasidut, ‫ )חסידות‬originally signifies “piety” and this movement in modern East European Judaism accentuated the

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immanence, communication, and celebration of God in the world in contrast to the conception of a purely distant transcendent God. Buber’s mature postwar writings express reservations concerning the monistic and mystical tendencies that he finds expressed in East Asia (Daoism, Zen) and South Asia (Hinduism and Buddhism).25 Forms of mystical experiencing and thinking of an ultimate unified oneness, a unity without a genuine neighbor and other and thus lacking the personal, is criticized by Buber from the relational yet individuating perspective of the interpersonal I and thou; that is, of a self and other that cannot be reduced to or absorbed in a “we” much less a unifying absolute “one” in which the distinction between I and being is overcome.26 The genuine God transcends unity and entails the distinction between the divine and the human and consequently the reality of individual personhood. The Jewish God is an interlocutor and a teacher for humanity. Buber differentiates the mysticism that occurs in dialogical intercourse and the mysticism of absorption into the relentless impersonal unity of the one.27 Hasidism contains elements of both forms of mysticism. It partakes in the mysticism of oneness with Sufi, Hindu Bhakti, Medieval Christian, and East Asian Daoist and Zen Buddhist forms of mysticism.28 In Chapter 8, we will trace how Buber’s account of Zen as monism and mysticism is inaccurate and in need of being problematized. Buber recognizes an affinity between the Hasidic and the Zen teacher-student relationship that occurs through a dialogue full of surprises, reversals, and narratives while stressing the more fully dialogical and ethical emphasis on the other person in Hasidism.29 Buber’s vision of Hasidism distinguishes it from other forms of mysticism, with which it shares affinities and parallels, by highlighting not only the oneness of the sacred but the ethical priority of the other person over the mystical experience of the divine. Judaism offers in Buber’s comparative portrayal, so to speak, a more perfect teaching in this respect by its focus on the life of the neighbor: “Jewish religious wisdom coincides, from an entirely different angle, with an ancient Chinese one: whosoever brings themselves into unison with the Sense of Being, also brings the world into unison; but the Hasidic saying states what is lacking in all Daoism: you must draw the next person into the unity, and so exercise an influence for good.”30 Despite his early interpretations and defense of non-Western philosophy and religion in response to Franz Rosenzweig’s dismissive rejection of nonWestern modes of thought in The Star of Redemption, Buber’s own position inches increasingly closer to Rosenzweig in privileging monotheism, and in particular the ethical personalist account of Judaism that reveals a

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conception of prophetic justice lacking in other traditions and a dialogue between a genuine I and thou. Buddhist and Daoist deconstructions of self and other are increasingly perceived as a destruction of this ethical encounter and engagement between self and other. Buber described the Buddha, in his classic work I and Thou (Ich und Du, first published in German in 1923), as a “true teacher” who does not impart mere views and opinions, but “teaches the Way.”31 This is how he described Laozi and Zhuangzi, as described in Chapter 4. Yet already in I and Thou, and the years preceding it, Buber rejected “mysticism”—including his own earlier phase of mystical enthusiasm—as selfish intoxication and an absorption into a unified whole that obscures the ethical sense and priority of the relation between self and other. He is concerned with the problem of absorption and participation into the all and the one in mysticism, a concern that was further developed through his exchanges with his friend and co-translator of the Torah, Rosenzweig, for whom the Buddha taught the “falsehood” that “the nothing is God,” thereby doubly misconstruing the Buddha’s teaching.32 The Buddha did not obviously speak of the nothing or God in Rosenzweig’s sense of these words that is informed by Judeo-Christian thinking about God creating being from nothing. There is no discourse of a monotheistic God in Buddhism and the nothing is not the substantial “independent subject” (selbständiges Subjekt) in Buddhism that Rosenzweig anachronistically asserts it to be. The reification of nirvāṇa, which Rosenzweig notes transcends beings and nothingness, into a substantialized static absolute nothing is untrue to the Buddhist experience and conception of emptiness (Skt. śūnyatā; Ch. kong ぎ). The Kyōto School thinker Keiji Nishitani 㽓䈋ଧ⊏ (1900–1990) described “absolute nothingness” (zettai mu ㍊ᇒ⛵) in a Buddhist sense as “the field of emptiness (śūnyatā)” or a “field of bottomlessness” that cannot be elucidated or exhausted.33 Absolute nothingness is to be distinguished from all relative, oppositional conceptions of nothingness, of which it is empty, as absence, negation, or negativity with respect to the positivity of being or God. The field of emptiness is irreducible to unity or oneness; it signifies “the None in contrast to, and beyond the One—which enables the myriad phenomena to attain their true being and realize their real truth.”34 Rosenzweig’s proposition that nothingness should be interpreted as the anticipation and expectancy of being, based on his interpretation of divine creation and the futural character of time, is accordingly not the objection to the Buddhist understanding of nothingness that he proposes. Nothingness is not mere void or an “absolute” in this sense; śūnyatā must be, in the classic Madhyamaka formulation, self-emptying and emptiness

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emptied of itself. As Nishitani elucidates, emptiness and fullness are co-arising and interdependent rather than opposites that require divine intervention to transition from one to the other. Rosenzweig is committed to a conventional Western understanding of nothingness, as merely negative and a mere naught, which shapes his misunderstanding of Buddhist emptiness. We will return to this crucial question of nothingness and emptiness, this time in the context of Chan Buddhism and Heidegger, in Chapter 8. Buber offers in I and Thou a sympathetic but not uncritical portrait of the historical Buddha Siddhārtha Gautama. He argues that we should learn from a genuine teacher such as the Buddha while, at the same time, we can only follow him to a certain extent without becoming untrue to our own life and way.35 The general formula of learning from without losing oneself is repeated in “China and Us.” As with Chinese Daoism, Buber recognizes Hasidic-like moments in Buddhist and Zen philosophy such as living in the fullness of moment, the rejection of metaphysical and theological speculation, and the importance of encounter, dialogue, and teaching/learning. However, Buber maintains, the Jewish experience is fundamentally different as one of being exiled in the world and celebrating the traces of the divine and transcendent within the immanence of the world, while the Zen experience is one of being immanently at home within it. The Buddha did recognize the I-thou relationship; however, Buber argues, he did not teach it. Without an adequate teaching of the centrality of the dynamic between I and thou, Buddhism became another doctrine of absorption into the unity of the one that undoes the “eternal Thou” and undermines the real concrete person encountered in genuine dialogical relationships.36 Buber’s depiction of the Buddha here should be questioned as much as Rosenzweig’s. Rosenzweig and Buber both prioritize the ethical moment of the Torah, interpreted in prophetic and dialogical terms, and evaluate Buddhism from their own ethical personalist perspective. The striking difference between them is that Rosenzweig’s assessment is purely external, while Buber’s approach is significantly more—even if not unrestrictedly—hermeneutically open to encountering and learning from non-Western and Asian experiences and conceptions. He refuses to deny their interest and validity as such and engages in conversation and argumentation with other discourses. Rosenzweig’s dialectical procedure and his conception of history compel him to construct a hierarchy of spirit that is as deeply problematic and ultimately as ethnocentric as the one constructed by Hegel. Rosenzweig remains beholden to the Hegelian philosophy that he sought to undo and overturn. Buber’s contrasting openness

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to the possibility of engagement is due to his Diltheyian hermeneutical concern for the diversity of concrete individual and social experiences, his practice of dialogue—which he undertook in meetings and written exchanges with diverse figures across the globe—and his lack of a (positive or negative) teleological and ideological account of history that culminates in the fullness or poverty of the present or the moment to come. The messianic prophetic moment did not lead to the exclusion of the non-Jewish and non-Greek/non-Western other in Buber, as it arguably did in the cases of Rosenzweig and subsequently in Emmanuel Levinas.37 Rosenzweig’s hostility toward non-Western philosophy and religion is also conveyed in Levinas. He follows the spirit of Hegel and Rosenzweig, rather than that of Leibniz and Buber, in his few remarks about non-Western thought and the “Asian world” that he negatively contrasted with the “Greco-Judeo-Christian West.”38 Levinas can completely—if guiltily when he wishes to hide it under his breath—dismiss and exclude it from the seriousness of intellectual and practical life in an interview in which he stated: “I always say—but under my breath—that the Bible and the Greeks present the only serious issues in human life; everything else is dancing.”39 This remark is not a complement, as some interpreters pretend, given the centrality of the dynamic between Athens and Jerusalem in the constitution of ethical rationality in his thought. Levinas dismissed as dancing, as merely physical gesticulation and movement, what Buber had praised as expressions of the divine in the midst of life in the case of Hasidism. Levinas did not only perceive seductive faddish exoticism in Western adaptations from the East. Continuing the legacy of Hegel and Rosenzweig, its privileging of Western experience as universal and dismissal of the purported experiences of others, he employs the monotheistic category of idolatry to declare in 1972: “But idolatry also encompasses all the intellectual temptations of the relative, of exoticism and fads, all that comes to us from India or China, all that comes to us from the alleged ‘experiences’ of humanity which we would not be permitted to reject.”40 Levinas maintained the “radical strangeness” of China that lacks “any familiar voice or inflection” and declared the “yellow peril” to be a “spiritual” rather than a “racial” threat to the West in his assessment of Chinese communism and nationalism in “Dialectics and the Soviet-Chinese Quarrel” (1960), which has been described by Slavoj Žižek as “his weirdest text.”41 The Eurocentric tendencies evident in Rosenzweig and Levinas reflect their identification of Judaism with the West in contrast to Buber, and the tense dialectic between Athens and Jerusalem that constitutes Western civilization in their eyes, in opposition to the ostensibly “primitive” and “Asiatic.”42

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Buber offers a different analysis of the history of Judaism and the contemporary role of the Jewish people that is linked to his cosmopolitan interpretation of Judaism and Zionism. Judaism is not merely one term—namely, in Rosenzweig, the esoteric ethical moment that teaches the pagan nations of the world through the exoteric teaching of Christianity—in the dialectic of the Occidental history of spirit; it is a student of as much as it is a teacher to the world. Judaism cannot be a pure expression of ethical reason and prophecy; it is a lived and transmitted social-historical reality. Furthermore, it has a unique historical formation as it is a historically hybrid fusion of East and West that, in its modern incarnation, was wounded and scarred by its journey and thereby can reveal and teach an alternative ethical vision much like the maimed and disfigured bodies portrayed in Buber’s edition of the Zhuangzi. Buber envisions Judaism as an intrinsically intercultural and cosmopolitan tradition of learning that has been and can be a bridge between the nations. This hope, which like all messianic and prophetic hopes guides and orients ethical practices, is already suggested in an idealizing Orientalist language in his early lecture in 1912 on “The Spirit of the Orient and Judaism.” It is further articulated in his Hasidic writings that elucidate and legitimate the despised “Asiatic” experiences of Eastern Jews (Ostjuden) stigmatized and forgotten by both anti-Semitism and modern rationalistic Judaism.43 Buber’s concern with mutual exchange and learning is also manifest in his writings on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the possibility of communicative exchange, reconciliation, and peace.44 Speaking and hearing, teaching and learning, are the conditions and medium of ethical life and its transmission in Buber’s discourse. As we saw in Chapter 4 on his interpretation of Daoism, he did not share the enthusiasm for silence that he perceived in mysticism, Heidegger, and in his own early “mystical phase.” In his later discussion in Hasidism, Eastern philosophies purportedly endorse silence in the end rather than the dialogue and communication where the genuinely religious takes place as ethical encounter and exchange.45 Without the nuance and insight of his early interpretation of the Zhuangzi, Daoism is construed as lacking a genuine sense of the human other and reduced to “mysticism.” Buber described Western and Eastern varieties of mysticism as an escape from the interpersonal human encounter; the primordial ethical reality from which community arises.46 The living community is formed in the encounter between humans. Buber’s portrait of community has a Zhuangzian moment in resisting conservative communitarianism insofar as his notion of community demands contact, encounter, and dialogue. It consequently cannot rest in or be constrained by a predetermined, fixed, and exclusive tradition and essentialist sense of identity.

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Community requires living meetings and encounters that renew the bonds with and between generations and form new associations. A community does not consist of the current generation alone. It calls one to face the past and a transmission across generations that Buber finds to be particularly emphasized in Jewish, Chinese, and Zen accounts of ancestors and teachers. Akin to Heidegger at least in this respect, albeit without Heidegger’s language of the history of being and metaphysics and in regard to a Jewish rather than Greek-German lineage, Buber indicated the need and necessity of returning to and reencountering one’s own tradition. It is in Buber’s case Jewish spiritual and meditative traditions that should not be forgotten in what he described as the desire for consuming exotic Eastern wisdom. Buber’s comments about exotic wisdom might appear as dismissive as those of Adorno and Heidegger, Rosenzweig and Levinas, discussed previously. Such remarks express a fear of losing a sense of one’s own identity in the encounter with what is other than oneself. Buber’s discourse is ambiguous, containing both dismissive comments and appreciative insights, and expressing both anxieties and hopes in encountering the other. In Buber’s account of the cultural other, the encounter is simultaneously a risk and an opportunity to learn: the deeper encounter with oneself (e.g., one’s own Judaism) can be made possible by the encounter with the other (e.g., Zen Buddhism). Having a specific sense of one’s identity, such as a Jewish one, should not preclude dialogical learning from the other, as we will observe in the story of Rabbi Eizik discussed in the following section of this chapter. In Buber’s art of responsive and critical intercultural interpretation, Zen Buddhism can and should be recognized as a teacher even if one does not become a Zen Buddhist, as genuine dialogue with the other leads to a more authentic understanding of oneself. The other twentieth-century German philosopher who repeatedly expressed interest in Zen Buddhism, Heidegger, did learn from Daoist and Zen sources and interlocutors, as other chapters in this book have demonstrated. Nonetheless, from the perspective of Buber’s intercultural hermeneutics, Heidegger failed to make such learning and teaching, as an actuality or a possibility that could be anticipated in the present rather than the distant future to come, part of his explicit teaching and way.

Anecdotes about learning Modern Western philosophy, committed to an alienated vision of theory, disdains for the most part the personal, the biographical, and the anecdotal. Jewish and East Asian traditions are fond of employing examples, exemplars, and anecdotes

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as a way of teaching and pointing the way. In his essay “The Place of Hasidism in the History of Religion,” which appeared as a chapter of Hasidism in 1948, Buber narrated a story of how Rabbi Eizik, the son of Rabbi Yekel, undertook a journey from Krakow to Prague in order to find a treasure. Eizik discovered through a meeting with a Christian in Prague that the treasure he sought is not in Prague but in fact lies beneath his own home in Krakow. This Hasidic tale illustrates how the encounter with the other (in this case the Christian) brings one (in this case Eizik) to an understanding of oneself (in this case Judaism).47 R. J. Zwi Werblowsky reports of an encounter between an American enthusiast, a Zen master, and Buber in Jerusalem that is evocative of Buber’s dialogical philosophy and the Chan Buddhist encounter dialogue (wenda ଣㄨ): The American talked, Buber listened, and the Zen master sat in silence. With great verve the American held forth that all religions were basically one, different variations on an identical theme, manifold manifestations of one and the same essence. Buber gave him one of his long, piercing looks, and then shot at him the question: “And what is the essence?” At this point, the Zen master could not contain himself: he jumped from the seat and with both hands shook the hands of Buber.48

This story, and we should recall from Chapter 4 that the story is the highest vehicle of philosophical reflection, is another illustration of how the interplay, relationality, and mutuality of “I and thou” in dialogue differ from a monological or monistic conceptualization of the world that posits a common underlying essence to philosophy or religion. Buber’s critical turn with regard to “Eastern mysticism,” as a teaching of absorbed immersion and participation rather than ethical separation, was employed more critically against Buddhist and Hindu than Chinese discourses. Buber did at times in later texts recognize once again his earlier position— recalling his earlier reading of Daoism and Confucianism—the dialogical moment of I and thou in Chinese philosophy. In particular, he remarked of the ultimately humanistic relationship between teacher and discipline in his postwar essay on Hasidism and Zen Buddhism: Both in Zen and in Hasidism the relationship between teacher and disciple is central. Just as there is no other people in which the corporeal bond of generations has achieved such significance, as in China and Israel, I know of no other religious movement which has to such an extent as Zen and Hasidism connected its view of the spirit with the idea of spiritual propagation. In both, paradoxically man reveres human truth, not in the form of a possession, but

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in the form of a movement, not as a fire that burns upon the hearth, but, speaking in the language of our time, like the electric spark, which is kindled by contact.49

Part Two: Dialogical Ethics and Zen Buddhist Ethics The concrete and the other One key ethical personalist criticism of Buddhism and Zen, evident in different degrees in Rosenzweig and Buber, is that the personalist concern with the concreteness of things and ordinary human ethical life must, in the end, be sacrificed to the ideal of awakening that undoes and overcomes concreteness, diversity, and individuality. One of Buber’s commentators remarked in this fashion: “Although in the case of Zen, they seem to pay serious attention to the Concrete, but it is not the attention for the sake of the Concrete, but merely an expedient to attain to ‘Satori’ (Enlightenment), if I understand correctly.”50 This reading, as well as those of other critics of the idea of Zen “unity” inspired by Buber’s ethical prioritization of the interpersonal I and thou that they perceive to be lacking in Zen, introduces a distinction and duality between the concrete and awakening that is uncharacteristic of Zen.51 Satori (ᙳȟ, Ch. wu ᙳ) is not a separable goal or end independent of the mundane ordinary life in which awakening occurs. It might be more appropriately described, to tentatively employ Western philosophical language adopted from Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment, as purposiveness without a purpose. Awakening is purposefully pursued and cultivated, but it is not a purpose, goal, or end that can be actually cultivated or achieved. Awakening constitutes “one mind” (ϔᖗ, Ch. yixin; Jp. isshin) with the real, signifying “seeing into one’s own nature” (㽟ᗻ, Ch. jianxing; Jp. kenshō) and recognizing the nexus of emptiness and concrete fullness of things in their own suchness or thusness (Skt. tathātā; Ch. zhenru ⳳབ). Zhen ⳳ indicates the real and ru བ what is so as it is so, such that the emptiness of awakening is not nothing, in the Western ontotheological sense, but the encounter with and mindfulness of reality just as it is. The Indian Buddhist notion of tathātā signifies in Zen Buddhist discourses the interdependent uniqueness of particular things revealed in their unsacred secularity and familiar ordinariness, which is the site where the encounter with the sacred takes place. According to the Hongzhou lineage (⋾Ꮂᅫ) in Tang dynasty China, “ordinary mind is the Way” (pingchang xin shi dao ᑇᐌᖗᰃ䘧)

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and “this mind is the Buddha” (shixin shi fo ᰃᖗᰃԯ).52 Mazu Daoyi 侀⼪䘧ϔ (709–788) described how “though the dharma is not attached to anything, every phenomenon one has contact with is thusness.”53 The Japanese Sōtō (᳍⋲, Ch. Caodong) Zen master Eihei Dōgen ⽾᏿䘧‫( ܗ‬1200–1253) illuminated how mindfulness within the ordinary and everyday is the perfection of Zen meditation (ത⽙, Ch. zuochan; Jp. zazen). It is in this context where the Zen focus on concreteness and singularity as part of the interdependent nexus of reality becomes apparent and the ethical and interpersonal dimension of Zen, “ethical” in the immanent this-worldly sense of the Way (dao) as an ethos, can be situated. The “ordinary mind” addressed by Chan/Zen Buddhism as the site of awakening is the matter in question. This mind’s self-awakening signifies in one depiction of it: “no intentional creation or action, no right or wrong, no grasping or rejecting, no terminable or permanent, no profane or holy… Now all these are just the Way: walking, abiding, sitting, lying, responding to conditions, and handling matters.”54 The self-manifestation of things is expressed in Dōgen’s discussion of the self-blossoming of the world as it is and in its suchness or the liberation and non-abiding of things as an abiding in their own phenomenal expression.55 This is not an ontological claim about enlightenment that steps beyond and transcends things and others; it is an ethical claim concerning how one encounters and, in the encounter, responsively relates to human others and the dynamic and interactive blossoming and happening of things. There is consequently genuine concreteness in Zen awakening. Indeed, being at one with the concreteness and flow of the world might be the very reason for the other more serious suspicion: Can there be a genuine ethical self and other as ethical other in Zen? Or does Zen cultivate de-individuated robots and kamikaze, who do not fear their own death or killing others, as Koestler maintained?

A Zen ethos of encounter and dialogue Buber posed the question of the I/thou to Zen Buddhism and Japanese philosophers who, relying on their engagement with Zen Buddhist and Western philosophical sources, attempted to respond to this question in their own language without being familiar with Buber’s interpretation of Zen Buddhism. The Zen understanding of the I and thou is insufficient in Buber’s interpretation in Hasidism. The question of the I/thou is not only posed within Western philosophy. It takes on its own forms in East Asian philosophies such as Confucianism, Daoism, and Chan/Zen Buddhism.

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The I-thou question was explicitly posed and addressed by philosophers associated with the Kyōto school. Nishida Kitarō 㽓⬄ᑒ໮䚢 (1870–1945) published his essay “I and Thou” (“Watashi to nanji” ⾕ǽ∱) in 1932.56 Nishida’s use of I and thou was probably inspired by German theology rather than directly by Buber, whose work was first discussed in Japan in the mid1930s. Nishitani’s essay “The I-Thou Relation in Zen Buddhism” explicitly refers to both Buber and Nishida’s interpretations of the I-thou dynamic. He describes the profoundly dialogical character of the Zen kōan (݀Ḝ, Ch. gong’an), highlighting the role of humor and laughter in them in a way that Buber might have appreciated. Nishitani depicts here how the question of the I/thou encounter must be interpreted immanently from its own perspective, as it “cannot be answered at a distance, from somewhere outside the encounter itself. Nor can it be answered with the tools of biology, anthropology, sociology, or ethics, which cannot fathom its depth dimension.”57 He concludes that Buber’s approach to the I and thou “has its own validity”; yet is insufficient. Buber’s account, he continues, “is far from exhausting the hidden depths of the person-to-person, I-and-Thou, relationship. Where it stops is the very point at which Zen exploration begins.”58 How then is Buber’s interpretation of the I and thou, and the dialogical character of Zen Buddhism articulated by Nishitani, insufficient? Buber’s willingness to learn from Zen and engage in conversation and argumentation with it is hermeneutically and interculturally suggestive. Buber fails to adequately consider the transformative and ethical moments operative in Zen Buddhism and the Zen ethos of encounter and dialogical exchange.59 The concluding sections of this chapter will outline a response to the Western philosophical marginalization of Zen Buddhism based on traditional East Asian Zen sources and the modern Japanese Kyōto school, who explicitly posed and addressed questions of the ethics of the I and thou in Zen, in the context of the suspicions expressed by Buber and others in order to consider the reality and possibility of a dialogical Zen Buddhist ethics. A number of contemporary authors, such as Christopher Ives and Simon P. James, have argued that Zen ethics is best described as a variety of virtue-ethics that accentuates cultivating specific perfections (pāramitā), characteristics or virtues such as wisdom and compassion, and one’s character as a whole.60 The virtue-ethical paradigm does not adequately clarify the specificity and dialogical character of Zen ethics, as it focuses on the self and its virtues and does not recognize that the Zen ethos is a relational and other-oriented disposition in which perfections and virtues are not cultivated and realized for the sake of the

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self but rather in loving kindness, compassion, and generosity toward sentient beings in general as well as nature as an interconnected dialogical whole. While classical Aristotelian virtue ethics focuses on the moral self-cultivation and the mastery of the aristocratic citizen and householder, various forms of Buddhism emphasize an ethical bio-spiritual cultivation that transcends the self, its mastery, and its socially defined virtues in a condition of homelessness and openness that allows for encountering and responding to beings. The aretaic virtue model is accordingly inappropriate for Zen Buddhist ethics insofar as (1) moral practices and virtues are constitutively necessary for but do not exhaust the walking of the path; (2) habits, customs, and traditions can motivate but are neither the goal nor a final court of ethical appeal and judgment; (3) aretaic ethics is arguably complicit with inter-human social domination and the human domination of nature; and (4) Zen ethics can be more appropriately characterized as a relational dialogical “ethics of encounter” between beings that prioritizes the care of the other over the care of the self in loving-kindness, compassion, and generosity. An alternative way of interpreting Zen ethics is necessary, one that departs and corrects the accounts of Buber and Buddhist virtue ethics; that is, an interpretation of its ethics that is more deeply rooted in the dialogical ethical implications of “encounter” in the Chan and Zen Buddhist transmission. Of particular significance are (1) the “encounter dialogues” between persons and (2) encounters with natural phenomena such as animals and landscapes. A Zen ethos of nourishing sentient beings and “nature” as a whole is constituted in being experientially exposed to and encountering others, things, and oneself. Given the continuing prevalence of views and practices reducing the natural world to an indifferent background for human activity and selfrealization or natural phenomena to instrumental objects of exploitation defined exclusively according to human desires and projects, there is a definite salience in being reminded that there can be more to life than human desires and projects as well as in being challenged to consider the reality that human responsibility extends beyond communication with and obligations to other humans—even as compassion toward humans and inter-human responsibilities should not be abandoned in the name of saving a romanticized image of nature or the sacred and holy that forgets human suffering. According to Dōgen in the Genjōkōan (⧒៤݀Ḝ, “Actualizing the Fundamental Point”): “to study the Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things. To be enlightened by all things is to remove the barriers between one’s self and others.”61 Buber

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might have explained this utterance as a theme that is “common to mysticism generally, one in which its tendency to eliminate the barrier between I and Thou, in order to experience Unity.”62 Zen, as he remarks, “no longer opposes the ‘I’ to Being, but experiences Unity.”63 This misses the fundamental point; the Zen Buddhist destructuring of the barriers and borders between self and other described by Dōgen does not aim at mere oneness whether understood as a mystical or metaphysical unity; it concerns the ethical relationship in which the self is no longer privileged over the other, as self and other are no longer unconditionally differentiated rather than subordinated into the one. The removal of barriers is not mere absorption and participation into being; it is the realization of a relational ethos of responsiveness and compassion that crosses the conditional borders and limits posited between beings. Zen Buddhism cannot then merely be an issue of the care of the “self ” to the exclusion of others in focusing on polishing the self in self-cultivation. This model of self-concern is repeatedly rejected in Zen texts; for instance, as a form of gradual enlightenment that continually dusts off the mirror (the self) without seeing the lucidity of things (by stepping beyond the barriers of the self). Awakening is not constituted through the self and its activities; but rather it occurs, as in a flash of lightning, in the self being exposed to, opening itself up to, and encountering others, things, as well as itself. This relational dependently co-arising self is the “genuine self ” or “self-nature” of the ordinary mundane mind.

Antinomianism, ethics, and Chan Buddhism Chan/Zen Buddhism has been interpreted by a number of proponents and critics as antinomian, amoral, and antagonistic to ethical judgment. Ethical conventions and categories are rejected as dualistic, categorizing, judgmental forms of thinking to be overcome in a subitist vision of awakening. The concept of “antinomian,” stemming from the Greek ἀντί νόμος (against the law), emerged from the Christian tradition and is a polemical term used against those who professed the absolute priority of faith to the point of undermining ordinary ethical concepts and conventions. The problem of antinomianism is not only a recent concern, and it is not only one that applies to modern nationalistic appropriation of Zen in imperial Japan. Criticisms of what we now call “antinomianism” (that is, the radical undermining of the ethical) belong to the Chan tradition itself—e.g., the response of the Tang dynasty master Guifeng

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Zongmi ഁዄᅫᆚ (780–841) to the Hongzhou lineage of Chan associated with Mazu—and other forms of Buddhism and Neo-Confucianism. Zongmi maintained that if everything is true or pure “just as it” is in its non-dual suchness, then all ethical distinctions and spiritual undertakings are undermined. Zongmi was concerned with whether the priority of ordinary mind as the Way in Mazu’s teaching undermined the disciplined cultivation of the Buddhist path and whether anti-conventionalism entailed the destruction of religion, morality, and ethical life. Zongmi described how Chan non-dual practices do not entail the negation or absence of Buddhist ethical distinctions such as the difference between the wholesome and unwholesome. Zongmi’s definition of wisdom is of knowing both the human and the non-human realms, and Buddhist illumination consists in knowing oneself, and finding the self ’s source or root (ben ᴀ).64 The awakening of faith is not an end in itself. It should open up rather than close off the mindfulness that consists of being awakened by and tracelessly responsive to the suchness or as-is-ness of others and things or “freely manifesting oneself in response to things without any bounds.”65 The ethos of Zen is to be responsive to the things and others within their mutual encounter. The Sino-Korean Neo-Confucian tradition criticized the Chan tradition and its ethos. The Korean Seon (Chan) Buddhist monk Gihwa Ꮕ੠ (Hamheo Deuktong ⎉㰮ᕫ䗮) (1376–1433), like Zongmi, wrote commentaries on The Sutra of Perfect Enlightenment and was concerned with justifying the ethical character of Chan Buddhism and presenting Buddhism as a more perfect teaching than Confucianism and Daoism. Gihwa’s Hyeonjeong non 乃ℷ䂪 (Exposition of the Correct) is a response to the Neo-Confucian critique of Buddhism articulated by Jeong Dojeon 䜁䘧‫( ڇ‬1342–1398) in his Array of Critiques of Buddhism (Bulssi Japbyeon ԯ⇣䲰䕼) from 1398.66 Gihwa distinguished two forms of Buddhist “ethics” in this work: (1) an elementary “shallow” level of precept-following (໿Ѩ៦क୘ᬭЁП᳔⏎㗙гDŽᴀ⠆″П᳔ϟ㗙㗠䀁г) and (2) a non-dual practicing of the six perfections (pāramitā; luidu ݁ᑺ) associated with the recognition of the mutuality of generosity (dāna; bushi Ꮧᮑ) and dependent origination (paṭiccasamuppāda; yuanqi ㎷䍋). There is no “antinomian” rejection of ethics or morality in the works of these and other Chan/Seon Buddhist thinkers; there is a sense of the completion and perfection of the ordinary conventional morality of customs and rules in overcoming their preliminary and limited character in a spontaneous other-oriented and altruistic ethical practice. Emptiness (śūnyatā; kong) can be understood as enacted in rituals and practices of emptying that reveal the way in which things, others, and oneself can be encountered in their suchness just as they are (tathatā; zhenru Ⳳབ). The

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practice of emptiness, which will be further examined in Chapter 8 in relation to Heidegger and Chan, is enacted through a rich variety of Chan linguistic and behavioral strategies and provocations. These practices decenter and recenter conventional morality and religion in the rhetoric of Chan Buddhism to the extent that they point toward the possible encounter with and liberation of things in their truth and purity, their suchness. The dramatic and drastic gestures and rhetoric, which can be conventionalized and lose their transformative power, of the most radical forms of Chan (such as the Hongzhou lineage of Mazu and the Linji 㞼△ lineage) point toward the turning point in the experience of awakening that occurs through the monastic context and Chan Buddhist ritual behaviors, including those that provoke the question of the meaning of the ritual and insight into its emptiness. This radicalism aims at transforming one’s comportment and disposition in the world; it is not understood as “radical” in the sense of completely overturning ordinary moral and political practices and institutions. While the standard literature opposes antinomianism to morality, as a system of fixed rules and conventions, emptiness can be better understood as a practice of emptying of the conventional that reveals—through shocks, surprises, reversals, and other means and tactics—the field of emptiness in which things, others, and oneself can be encountered in their suchness. The destructuring of the ordinary mind and its idols for the sake of the ordinary mind, including the image of Huineng ᚴ㛑 tearing up the sutras and the provocative utterance by Linji Yixuan 㞼△㕽⥘ (d. 866 CE): “If you meet the Buddha, kill him” (feng fo sha fo 䗶ԯ↎ԯ). The aporetic ethics and religiosity of utterances such as “kill the Buddha,” which breaks the first precept not to do harm and strikes at the source and primary figure of Buddhism and the associated conventionally understood Buddhist soteriological path, is expressed in the most radical forms of Chan. It is associated with the images of “wild” Chan masters such as Mazu and Linji, who redirect practitioners toward the ordinary mind and its intrinsic openness for encountering and responding to the world from within the midst of the world. Zen is nonsense from the conventional perspective, and it must be misinterpreted from this perspective, but it is not mere “nonsense.” Its sense must be, as argued in the following chapter, performatively enacted each time again in the confrontation with ordinary conventional meaning and the reification of language and concepts in releasing and responsively encountering the “just as it is.”

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Conclusion The Seon Buddhist monk Gihwa’s work Hyeonjeong non allows us to trace a different path for understanding Zen ethics and intercultural hermeneutics. He reconstructed a conception of humaneness (ҕ, Ch. ren; K. in) and the mutual interconnectedness that allows for the comprehension of the underlying affinities, resonances, and differences between teachings through the example of the three teachings of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism. He critically interpreted them according to their capacity to disclose and extend a basic intrinsic humaneness toward others and all beings. Gihwa’s conception of humaneness has a universal conceptual scope, which Western philosophy has often denied non-Western discourses in its claim that the West is the only universal civilization not based on mere particularity. It is in a crucial sense more universal than Western ethical theories in not being restricted by binary oppositions between civilized and barbarian, East and West, or human and animal (as Gihwa discusses in another chapter of his work).67 Buber’s description of Zen Buddhism appreciates its humaneness that the other philosophers discussed in this chapter refuse to see. His interpretation involves the recognition, albeit it historically insufficient, of its ethos of encounter, dialogue, and learning that can be developed further for a more attentive interpretation of the ethical and dialogical moments in Zen. This chapter has offered reasons to contest the marginalization of Zen Buddhism in Western philosophy by examining how Buber’s vision of Zen, despite important limitations, is indicative for a more adequate understanding of the dialogical interpersonal relational nature of the Zen ethos and a critical intercultural hermeneutics in which Zen Buddhism is allowed to have a voice and to speak to us instead of being dismissed as robotic training, mysticism, nonsense, and a mere fad due to its foreign Asian origins and its strange—to conventional Western perception—garb, gestures, and ways of speaking.

8

Nothingness, Language, Emptiness: Heidegger and Chan Buddhism  ぎ㚠ぎDŽ ᕲ To pursue emptiness is to lose emptiness.1

Introduction In the intertextual discourse of comparative philosophy in East and West, Martin Heidegger and Chan (⽾; Jp. Zen) Buddhism have been depicted as disclosing “primordial experience” through the dismantling of the sedimentations and reifications that constitute and entangle language and conceptual thinking. In Heidegger, this destructuring (Destruktion) discloses an originary experience of being (Sein); in Chan, aporetic strategies reveal original mind (benxin ᴀ ᖗ) and self-nature (zixing 㞾ᗻ).2 The movement of dereification occurring through encountering nothingness (das Nichts) in Heidegger’s thinking and emptiness (kong ぎ) in Chan Buddhist discourses. Such indispensable yet traceless moments occur through the “releasement” of things and attending to, being responsive to, or mindful of the phenomena themselves in their upsurge and self-disclosure in Heidegger or in the one suchness (yiru ϔབ; Skt. tathatā) of the myriad things (wanfa 㨀⊩) in Chan.3 Analogously to phenomenological philosophy, which was explicated in Chapter 6, Chan Buddhism has its own phenomenological character (as Carl Jung noted) and faces its own issues of the reification of the processes and means of communication that potentially undermine rather than open up responsiveness to things and compassion toward others. The history of Buddhism recurrently demonstrates how Buddhist discourses of anti-essentialism and destratification can themselves undergo reification and become essentialized and conventional. This tendency toward decay through being transmitted holds of the most radical

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Buddhist discourses and practices, as the history of Chan Buddhism itself reveals. The incessantly stylized and restylized figure of Linji Yixuan 㞼△㕽⥘ (d. 866/7) was, for instance, progressively redepicted as more unconventional and more orthodox during the Song dynasty, precisely as masters became less able and likely to act in a wild and radically unconventional manner. The greatly exaggerated and caricaturized spontaneity, radicalism, iconoclasm, and antinomianism of Chan transpired in the context and under the conditions of traditional Buddhist practices, institutions, and doctrines, Chinese social-political conditions, and monastic disciplines and rituals.4 As spontaneity only occurs in and through these relational and accordingly interpretive contexts, the view that Chan/Zen dismantles fixated words and concepts for “pure” or “mystical” experience or intuition has been appropriately criticized as a naïve misinterpretation and reification of historical realities on the part of Zen’s fearful critics and overly enthusiastic proponents (as seen in Chapter 7). Historiographical analysis has illustrated the many ways that Chan deployed and becomes entangled in its own rhetoric, propaganda, and ideology.5 The content and form of Chan encounter dialogues already are an indication of the modern mythology surrounding the “anarchistic” and “counter-cultural” character of Zen Buddhism. They do not only divulge a free spontaneous and natural play of reversibility and reciprocity, but a responsibility for the other’s awakening even as the master asymmetrically cannot take the place of the student. Awakening is in each case one’s own. The radicalness of Chan spontaneity, naturalness, and iconoclasm transpires in contexts of ritual and monastic discipline in which they receive their transformative character and impact.6 Chan sources explaining Chan monastic disciple and ritual, such as the Baizhang Chan Monastic Regulations (chixiu baizhang qinggui ᬩׂⱒϜ⏙㽣) that contains rituals for the well-being of the emperor and officials, make the traditional Buddhist and Chinese social-political contexts of Chan practices clearer. The idea and rhetoric of a purely non-causal and non-karmic spontaneity is criticized in Chan traditions from the Tang dynasty Buddhist scholar and monk Guifeng Zongmi ഁዄᅫᆚ (780–841). Zongmi condemned what he saw as its immoral antinomian consequences of specific teachings in Daoism and Hongzhou ⋾Ꮂ Chan, to the warning of the fox gong’an (݀Ḝ; Jp. kōan) concerning Baizhang ⱒϜ and the monk who denied karmic causal conditioning, and our worldly complicity, and ended up conditioned by it in being reborn as a wild fox.7 As language itself is self-destructuring without a primordial entity or original experience standing outside of and separate from the self-reproduction and selfdestructuring of language, there is nothing outside of communication and the

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communicative event. Critics of Western discourses of mysticism appropriately reject the thesis that Chan and Zen belong to the category of “mysticism” and disclose an unmediated and non-relational “pure” intuition or experience.8 I propose an alternate interpretation of Chan Buddhist aporetic tendencies that recognizes the legitimacy of both deconstructive and historiographical analysis of Chan/Zen’s exaggerated self-presentation and their later Eastern and Western appropriations. Chan ought not be conceived as one unified ahistorical reality in either its practices or doctrines, and diversity and contestation are constitutive of its official history. Tang-Song Chinese Chan can be distinguished from the more metaphysical, mystical, and modern Japanese-centered approach attributed to the modern interpretations of Zen that emerged from D. T. Suzuki and the Kyōto school, which tend to interpret Zen as a unique culmination and discontinuous transcendence of previous forms of Buddhism.9 Unlike other works, which examine the later writings of Heidegger à propos Daoism and Japanese Zen, this chapter explores his early thought of the 1920s in relation to Tang-Song Chan Buddhism.10 The very idea of “Oriental nothingness,” articulated in the Kyōto school, presupposes the intercultural encounter between East and West and relies on an intertextual philosophical practice drawing on diverse sources and traditions. Returning to an earlier Chan discourse of emptiness does not offer access to a more primordial origin, but a different perspective of contesting and emptying perspectives, as this interpretation draws Chan further into intercultural philosophizing. In relation to Heidegger’s distinctive thinking of nothing (das Nichts), it is a misinterpretation of the discourses of Chan and Heidegger—which suppresses their hermeneutical in the name of their ontological character—to explain either as positing something beyond communication that transcends its own existential occurrence and performative enactment (Vollzug).11 The enactive articulation of Buddhist emptiness and Heidegger’s nothing offers an alternative interpretation to Nishitani Keiji 㽓䈋ଧ⊏. Nishitani contended in Religion and Nothingness (Shūkyō to wa nanika ᅫᬭǽȄԩǠ or “What is Religion?,” 1961) that: “in Heidegger’s case, traces of the representation of nothingness as some ‘thing’ that is nothingness still remain.”12 Heidegger, according to Nishitani, remained imprisoned in the Western paradigm of interpreting nothingness through thingliness. “Existentialists,” such as Nietzsche and Heidegger, have not yet reached the fullness of Buddhist emptiness (śūnyatā) that is in need of being liberated “from the bias of self-existence as the groundlessness (Grundlosigkeit) of existence lying at the ground of self-existence” or as some separable substantive existence “lying outside of the ‘existence’ of the self.”13

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Given the enactive indicative interpretation of the nothing and emptiness articulated in the present chapter, one can conclude that there is neither “Being” (Sein) and nothing nor “mind” (xin ᖗ) and emptiness in a non-relational sense. There can be no unmediated access in language and experience to static nonlinguistic entities that subsist beyond the event and enactment of interpretation, individuation, and appropriation, as would be revealed in a form of pure intuition or mystical experience. What is at issue then in Chan words such as nature, mind, and emptiness, and in Heidegger’s basic concepts such as being, existence, and nothingness, is living communication and the communicative event of saying that which cannot be directly—in a purely determinate and representative language—said. Heidegger’s nothing and Chan emptiness, which adopts and transforms the Indian notion of śūnyatā, both challenge conventional experience and language through what already informs and potentially reorients and transforms experience, language, and practice. Chan relies on and is enmeshed in experience, language, and practice, while stressing that these too are conditional, interdependent, and empty. Heidegger’s being is disclosed within language, history, and experience, while remaining concealed in, different than, and irreducible to such disclosure. The history of being (Seinsgeschichte) is being’s disclosure as well as its concealment and withdrawal in its occurrence. The epochality and concealedness of being is a historical-ontological insight that Kōichi Tsujimura, because he misses Zen’s own form of communicative performativity, finds problematically lacking in Zen.14

Part One: The Question of Nothing Awakening to the basic question According to the Song dynasty Chan teacher Dahui Zonggao ໻᜻ᅫᵆ (1089–1163), there are two kinds of awareness: (1) direct awareness of the “beginningless present,” which “flows out point by point from within your own heart to cover heaven and earth”; and (2) the comparative awareness that is “gained from external refinements,” discerning, fixing, and fixating names and categories.15 The intrinsic inappropriateness of comparative thought is not an ideal starting point for addressing the nothing in Heidegger’s works in relation to emptiness (either in the “not” [wu ⛵] and the Chinese term for śūnyatā [kong ぎ]). Comparison is inevitably external and reifying, and the “not” of the incomparable does not appear to permit much to be said.

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Heidegger began his 1928/29 lecture course Introduction to Philosophy by reflecting on the question of how “we” can begin to enter into philosophy, concluding that this is a false problem as we are already within philosophy the moment the question is posed.16 This “we” is already within philosophy in myriad ways with varying degrees of wakefulness. Philosophy cannot begin from historical or systematic analysis or comparisons, as these lead astray from rather than awakening to philosophizing.17 Philosophy does not transpire as long as one remains external to it in talking about it as an object. It happens in its enactment through “bringing philosophizing underway” and letting its matter and question become “free in us in this situation.”18 The question is philosophical in striking back at the one who poses it. In asking, the questioner is placed in question, and the self is exposed to the question of its own existence.19 The need for self-knowledge, to know oneself, finds no response in our everyday ontic concepts and categories. This absence is intensified in the happening of philosophy in which “the complete nothingness of human essence” (“die totale Nichtigkeit menschlichen Wesens”) is exposed.20 This nothingness, which here signifies non-essence, is neither merely negative in the sense of negation nor external to human existence. It is identified later in the same 1928/29 lecture-course with a radical absence of ground and abyss that provokes human existence into recognizing its essential lack of essence, bearing, and orientation (Haltlosigkeit).21 Even keeping silent cannot evade this situation, as silence cannot escape but presupposes and relates to being and nothing inevitably in one way or another.22 As human existence cannot even be secure in refusal and silence, speaking must take up and attempt to clarify this risky lack of bearing as its point of departure, and nowhere more so than in attempting to speak about the incommunicable, non-relational, and uncanny nothing.

The question of the nothing in Carnap and Heidegger ҎϡᬶᖬᖗDŽᘤ㨑ぎ⛵ᩜᩌ㰩DŽϡⶹぎᴀ⛵ぎDŽଃϔⳳ⊩⬠㘇DŽü咘Ꮰ䘟 People are afraid to forget the mind, fearing that they will fall through the void with nowhere to grab hold. They do not understand that the void is without void, that there is only one true Dharma body. —Huangbo Xiyun23 It is a customary protocol of polite conversation and formal logic that one not speak about nothing. Ludwig Wittgenstein concluded the Tractatus Logico-

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Philosophicus with the words: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”24 As he argued earlier, no propositions can be legitimately made about what lies outside the world even as the sense and value of the world must at the same time rest outside it.25 This is what he calls the “mystical.” If the world consists of facts and logical relations between facts, then metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics “cannot be expressed.”26 Analogously, albeit without Wittgenstein’s mystical tone concerning the inexpressible that reveals itself,27 the prominent Vienna Circle logical positivist Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) rejected such inquires as ineffectual. Affirming Wittgenstein’s proposition 6.5 that “the riddle does not exist,” there are no “riddles of life” that are answerable questions for Carnap, as life-issues can only be about practical situations.28 Metaphysical propositions, including those concerning moral and aesthetic values and norms, are not false or uncertain. They are cognitively and epistemically if not emotively and expressively meaningless.29 The differences between Heidegger and Carnap are frequently interpreted as a historical source of the division between a more speculatively oriented “Continental philosophy” and a more scientific and logically oriented “Analytic philosophy.” However, Heidegger and Carnap shared a common intellectual context characterized by Neo-Kantianism, phenomenology, life-philosophy, linguistic and experiential holism, an antagonism toward traditional metaphysics as a reification of life and being, a suspicion of epistemological and ethical discourses, and the German youth movement of the years following the First World War. Carnap emerged—along with Misch—as one of Heidegger’s earliest critics, emphasizing the application of the new formal logic pioneered by Frege and Russell to philosophical questions, the priority of the natural sciences and the elimination of metaphysical thinking, as well as social democratic politics.30 In “Overcoming Metaphysics through the Logical Analysis of Language,” based on an earlier lecture (1929) and first published in Erkenntnis, 2, 1931/32, Carnap criticized Heidegger’s delineation of the nothing in “What is Metaphysics?” as a conceptually non-meaningful confusion that involves the substantializing of the logical operation of negation that senselessly posits and reifies “nothing” as an object by taking it as a noun. Metaphysical propositions, including those concerning moral and aesthetic values and norms, are neither false nor uncertain. They are not hypotheses that might be eventually empirically verified. If cognitively valid meaning rests in the possibility of empirical verification, then metaphysics consists of “pseudo-propositions” that are cognitively and epistemically, albeit not affectively or expressively, senseless.31

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Carnap contends that negation is merely the reversal of an existential proposition, and as a consequence cannot be treated as affirming existence or an object.32 Negation immanently and derivatively denies the factual and logical propositions that it depends on for its significance. The nothing is parasitical on positivity and has no further cognitive significance. Carnap concluded that metaphysical utterances senselessly reify logical operations such as the assertion of being and nothing and, developing an argument from Dilthey, are at best a poor replacement for art, literature, and music in expressing a “feeling of life” (Lebensgefühl).33 Carnap upholds that Heidegger’s proposition that “nothing nothings” (das Nichts nichtet) has no genuine cognitive content that can be thematized and validated even as it elicits feelings akin to those evoked in poetry while senselessly ascribing conceptual validity, which consists of empirical verifiability and logical validity, to them. It is a meaningless error in elementary logic to talk of nothing for Wittgenstein and Carnap. Despite its taking on a modernized form of the critique of metaphysics, such hostility to the nothing is not new with the emergence of logical positivism. It has deeper roots in the Western metaphysical tradition.34 The Western tradition has primarily maintained purportedly since Parmenides that “nothing comes from nothing” (nihil fit ex nihilo) and that either Being or a God beyond being are necessary for the universe not to remain in or disappear into nothingness. The Christian idea of creation from nothing (creatio ex nihilo) presupposes a God who stands outside of and beyond the nothing that is overcome through the activity of creation. The Neo-Platonists associated nothing with the denial and lack of being, as a lack of and exclusion from the good. Augustine conceived of it more radically as evil. Nothingness is distance from God, and evil is choosing it over God. Although materiality and the devil are evil in Augustine’s account, they cannot be absolutely evil insofar as they share in existence—even if only negatively and derivatively through privation and lack. In Heidegger, responding to this tradition, God’s distance from and creation out of the nothing forms a paradox. It incongruously presupposes that God relates to the nothing in excluding it, even though—as God—God “cannot know the nothing, assuming that the ‘absolute’ excludes all nothingness.”35

The question of nothingness in Western philosophy The discourse of the nothing is already an intercultural and intertextual one. When early modern Europeans encountered the Buddhist conception of

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śūnyatā, they characteristically understood it as signifying either an illogical selfcontradictory concept or—by associating nirvana with extinction—a nihilistic void. Such an interpretation was developed in the early twentieth-century by Franz Rosenzweig, who claimed that the “nothing is God” in Buddhism, as discussed in Chapter 7. The Buddhist conception of emptiness, rooted in meditative practices and experiences, was denigrated as senseless metaphysics, ethically antinomian, or religiously dangerous. Both logical and metaphysical (or ontotheological) positivism presupposed that the meaning and value of the world are not internal or immanent to the world itself. As significance can only come from outside of the world, in divine or logical transcendence, it is impossible or senseless to speak of the immanent self-disclosing meaning and value of things. Either such questions are transcendent, and meaningless, as in Wittgenstein and Carnap or there must be a metaphysical realm of forms or revelation of the transcendent that justifies and explains the significance of this-worldly things. Heidegger contests the Platonism that underwrites Western discourses of the nothing. He depicts how this lingering and risky question of nothing is not accidental or derivative to the Western tradition, since the exclusion of the nothing still relies on and takes recourse to the nothing it hopes to exclude.36 The question of nothing haunts the positing of what is and the supposedly unquestionably givenness—whether the positivity of God as the highest entity among others or of the factually given—through which philosophy has projected and framed being and endeavored to construe and master beings.37 Heidegger returns to Leibniz’s posing of the question of nothing. As a crucial step in his proof of God’s existence, Leibniz asks “Why is there something rather than nothing?” and answered that both terms, beings and nothing, could only be justified and explained through a third term, namely God, which is transcendent to and provides the external ground for both. If there were no God, there would be no sufficient reason for existence over nonexistence, and the world would disappear into nothingness. Since the world does exist, its sufficient reason must accordingly exist.38 Heidegger, who himself adopted the idiom of overcoming metaphysics, repeatedly returned to Leibniz’s argument. For Heidegger, the question of why there is something rather than nothing is the most perplexing question. It is baffling in its own terms of something (being) and nothing even before considering Leibniz’s further recourse to God as a transcendent third term. Rather than being or God, it is the nothing appearing in Leibniz’s argument that provokes the greatest perplexity and concern. Heidegger commented in his later introduction to “What is Metaphysics?” that he asks Leibniz’s question in a different sense than Leibniz. While for

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Leibniz “nothing is simpler and easier than anything,” for Heidegger: “If [the question] does not concern itself with beings and inquire about their first cause among all beings, then [it] must begin from that which is not being.”39 Heidegger’s description is inaccurate here to the extent that Leibniz, for example in his analysis of the Christian association of nothingness and evil in his Dialogue on Human Freedom (1695), noted how nothing “can enter into the composition of things” much like the zero in arithmetic. Leibniz’s text continues: things “are bounded or imperfect by virtue of the principle of negation or nothingness they contain, by virtue of the lack of infinity of perfections in them, and which are only a nothingness with respect to them.”40 The analysis of finitude as imperfection, as privation and sin, a conception that is still at work in Leibniz and stands in tension with Heidegger’s elucidation of the nothing in his argument, contrasts with the perfection of things “just as they are,” without recourse to a conception or experience of the transcendent, in the wild aporetic Hongzhou style of Chan associated with Mazu Daoyi 侀 ⼪䘧ϔ. Reflecting on nonbeing, Heidegger added in the postscript to “What is Metaphysics?”: “One of the essential sites of speechlessness is anxiety in the sense of the horror to which the abyss of the nothing attunes human beings.”41 We might consider at this point: Why does Heidegger venture speaking about the nothing in the face of such speechlessness? Is this not the logical confusion, religious error, or nihilistic void of which both metaphysical and antimetaphysical positivistic Western philosophy persistently warn?

Part Two: Emptying Emptiness Emptiness, not sacredness ߚ߹޵㘪✽ᛅ䔝ⲯDŽ Differentiating the mundane and the sacred is the source of endless vexations.42  There are varieties of Chan Buddhism that deny the categories of the sacred, the religious, and the divine in the name of emptiness, a strategy that threatens to make meaningfulness and significance tremble if not entirely disappear. Despite the distinct origins of Western and Buddhist thought, Western interpreters and critics of Buddhism, since the earliest modern encounters, have introduced the issues of nihilism and annihilationism into the interpretation of Buddhism by claiming that śūnyatā is an absolute or unconditional void that undermines

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any—to employ Nietzsche’s language—internally immanent and worldly or—for Christian critics—externally transcendent significance to things. The issue of a “cult of nothingness” nihilistically negating the world for the sake of nothing is more acute in those varieties of Buddhism, particularly Madhyamaka and Chan, which radically prioritize emptiness and the aporetic and paradoxical in relation to the positive reified theses and practices of Buddhism itself.43 The radical Buddhist self-questioning of the foundational premises of Buddhism is evident in numerous Chan question and answer dialogues (wenda ଣㄨ) that became the basis of the “public case” or gong’an ݀Ḝ literature and meditative practice. One encounter dialogue, which became the first case of the Blue Cliff Record (Biyan lu ⹻Ꭺ䣘) collection of gong’an, is the legend of Emperor Wu of the Liang Dynasty (ṕ℺Ᏹ) welcoming Bodhidharma 㦽ᦤ䘨ᨽ and telling him of his voluminous meritorious works: [W]hen the Emperor asked how much merit he had acquired, Bodhidharma answered “none.” He asked “What is the first principle of sacred truth?” Bodhidharma replied “Vast emptiness, nothing sacred (kuoran wusheng ᒧ✊ ⛵㘪).” He asked “Who then is facing me?” He replied “Don’t know.”44

This encounter is distinctive of the iconoclastic style of what was retrospectively designated the Hongzhou lineage associated with the “four masters” (Mazu, Baizhang, Huangbo, and Linji) established as orthodox in the Song dynasty.45 Welter argues that such examples of anti-authority and antiorthodoxy themselves become authoritative and orthodox.46 Their radicality consisted in conventional practices of the acquisition of merit through good works and banal ideas of the sacred being problematized by pointing out the emptiness of the agent, the works, and the sacred itself. In a similar manner, the fifth patriarch of Chan Buddhism Hongren ᓬᖡ is reported to have dismissed meritorious offerings and the pursuit of blessings (futian ⽣⬄), which represent a characteristic activity in ordinary Buddhism, in the Platform Sutra in favor of looking into oneself.47 The emptiness of the self is disclosed through this looking into oneself and perception of one’s nature. No matter how conventionalized and stratified emptiness might become in Buddhist traditions, they can be countered by realizing the emptiness of their own self-nature in self-observation. Or one might pursue Heidegger’s strategy of in each case posing and enacting the question anew for oneself in one’s own hermeneutical situation, abiding or lingering in its very questionability (Fragwürdigkeit). Although Heidegger’s approach to the disorienting and reorienting horror of the abyss of the nothing is absent in Chan texts, they are to an extent analogous in suggesting a kind of

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exposure to that which is not a something, not even a noumenal or transcendent something, but nothing. In an exchange from the Zhaozhou Yulu 䍭Ꮂ䁲䣘 (Recorded Sayings of Zhaozhou), which became the first gong’an in the Gateless Gate (Wumen Guan ⛵䭔䮰), a monk asked; “Does a dog have Buddha-nature or not (gouzi foxing ⢫ ᄤԯᗻ)”? Despite the inherent Buddha-nature that is inherent in every sentient being, the master replied “Not” or “No.”48 The Chinese word wu ⛵ does not only mean “not,” from its early Daoist context implies nothing or emptiness; the wu that is the absolute nothing or void in the phrase xuwu 㰯⛵. Reinhard May notes that the Chinese graph might be related to clearing, a place where there were once trees, which he compares to Heidegger’s clearing (Lichtung).49 This interpretation continues to give wu as nothingness a derivative meaning to presence, or that which was present in its givenness or positivity. This is problematic given the primordial character of Heidegger’s nothing as well as, in the current context, of Buddhist emptiness. Immanence is characteristically interpreted as the givenness and positivity of worldly phenomena or things, which are to be accepted as such or derived from a higher ideal or transcendent source. Here—between vast emptiness and selfempty dogs—the question arises not of the positivity of things and facts about them but of the self-given or immanent emptiness of the phenomena themselves. How are emptiness and the nothing, on the one hand, and, on the other, the immanent givenness, suchness, or thusness (Skt. tathatā; Ch. zhenru Ⳳབ) of things—empty and “just as they are” (faru ru ⊩བབ)—interconnected?50 Is the “not” an operational negation or can it have another function in its surprising performance or enactment? While nothing presupposes the logical negation that is its measure for Carnap; the opposite is the case for Heidegger. Logical negation and—even more radically—the positivity of things presuppose the empty and the open that allows humans to encounter things at all.51 Heidegger’s strategy of formalizing through the formless and emptying through the nothing discloses the openness that is the fullness of things. It is presupposed by language and experience yet only rarely disclosed in the experience of the nothing, which is not a thing at all but an object-less and non-intentional condition and way disclosed in moodful attunement.52 This condition becomes particularly visible in exceptional situations of uncanniness (Unheimlichkeit), where existence is experienced as slipping away and is left adrift and hanging, as in extreme boredom or anxiety in which sense is shaken to its core and shattered.53 The early Heidegger depicts an elemental disquiet (Unruhe)—a precursor to the constitutive uncanniness—as constitutive of history and life (Leben).54 The

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young Heidegger employs, while destabilizing, the language of Lebensphilosophie in depicting life as its own immanent ruination and questionability.55 Life is not only encountered as stability, security, and certainty but as dispersal, distance, and ruination (Ruinanz).56 Rather than being a continuum of vital energy or evolutionary progress, disquiet characterizes life and indicates its fundamental motility.57 This constitutive questionability indicates the need to confront life in both its everydayness and uncanniness, since the being of life is both most familiar and strange.58 What is most familiar in its everydayness remains unquestioned, and the uncanniness of everydayness left unspoken. Each is to this extent furthest from their own self. In uncanniness, the radical absence of ground (Ab-grund) and the nothing— like death anticipated as unanticipatable and inappropriable death—is not another something to be integrated and ordered in everyday existence or a conceptual system. Dasein is relational with itself, others, and its world, and yet the “nothing” is dis-relational; it ex-propriates rather than being something that can be appropriated or mastered. It resists being ordered and assimilated, disrupting the relationality constitutive of ordinary human existence. In aporetic and interruptive limit-situations, the “I” is de-personalized and existence reduced to its being-there (da-sein).59 Without experiences of the “not” and otherwise, the absolutely and fully other, the conceptualization of negation would not commence. Negation is only one way in which nihilation occurs and consequently cannot be the absolute measure of the nothing that it becomes in both ontotheological and positivist metaphysics and anti-metaphysics.60 Therefore, exposure to the nothing is not necessarily negative. Finite freedom and worldly transcendence, which signify being thrown (geworfen) into encountering (begegnen) world and things, grant humans the space to encounter and engage others, things, and ourselves. This signifies that we as human beings, as da-sein, can and do “release ourselves into the nothing.”61 Anxiety and boredom indicate this releasement in an extreme and heightened form, as they—and the nothingness they disclose— are presupposed without being recognized in each human comportment.

Playing with and without words The radicalism of Hongzhou Chan has been portrayed as a product of the Chan imagination during the Song dynasty, which it clearly is to a degree. It is not solely a Song creation to the extent that it is already criticized for its radicalism and antinomianism by Zongmi during the Tang dynasty.62 Hongzhou and Linji

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Chan—the identity and orthodoxy of which were stabilized in the Song period as a “golden age”63—are recognized for their simultaneous ruthless critique and creative exercise of communication. Its practice of indirect, paradoxical, and shocking ways of speaking pursues strategies that are simultaneously suspicious of language while elaborately employing it in manifold ways. Chan “wordless words” and “speechless speech,” which struck a sympathetic interpreter like Carl Jung as mostly nonsensical, are extraneous to the extent that they should not be taken as establishing an absolute standard or reifying concepts of the Buddha and awakening, as indicated by Yuanwu Keqin ೰ᙳ‫( ࢸܟ‬1063–1135).64 This manner of speaking without speaking and not speaking through speaking is incoherent if the expressive exercise of language is necessarily subordinate to its cognitive propositional use, or if it is impossible to performatively enact language against the referential character of language, as Carnap contended. McRae has described the significant difference between performative and referential utterances in Chan.65 Chan ways of speaking reveal the inadequacy of understanding language as purely cognitive, referential, and representational. Chan contests the deepest prejudices of Western philosophy concerning the essence and function of language. The tensions between performance and predication, experience and language should not be ignored nor unquestioningly reproduced, as the tensions clarify the extensive variety of linguistic tactics involved in ways of speaking that challenge conventional reified forms of speech and understanding. Heidegger’s interpretation of language might be helpful in this context. He claimed that predicative or propositional thinking is intentional and can therefore only conceive “nothing” as either another something, as an object of predication, or as absurd.66 Heidegger disputed the semantic paradigm of conventional and formal logic, which Chenyang Li has shown is inadequate to Chinese thought, as it makes the derivative primary insofar as truth as correctness presupposes the more originary encounter with truth as the openness of disclosure.67 The issue of truth concerns being wakeful and attuned to the question: Only if it belonged to the essence of philosophy to make the obvious incomprehensible and the unquestioned something questioned. Only if philosophy had the task of shocking common sense out of its presumptive selfglorification. Only if philosophy had the function of arousing us so that we become awake …68

Heidegger stresses that, however inappropriately and inadequately, the transition from representational to recollective thinking proceeds through

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representational thinking.69 The transition from metaphysics to another kind of thinking proceeds through metaphysical questions.70 Representational and predicative thinking and the tension between predication and performance are part of the movement of thought interpreted as a practice rather than as a propositional assertion of referential and representational contents. Chan linguistic practices allow us to reconsider Heidegger’s argument concerning language. Chan performatively places in question representational predication in utterances that themselves use predication, thus allowing each exercise of authority to be an occasion for criticism and further transformation.71 Such self-challenging and self-destructuring speaking is enacted in the Chan iconoclasm best exemplified in the shaped and reshaped figure of Linji, when—for instance—he advises Buddhists to kill the Buddha and the patriarchs or to become the genuine person without rank or position (wuwei zhenren ⛵ԡⳳҎ)—who Linji described as “here in this lump of red flesh” and as “a shitty ass-wiper.”72 Revealingly, as Welter has demonstrated, it is the later texts that have Linji speak with rawness of the “lump of red flesh” and “dried lump of shit,” whereas earlier texts have him speak of the “body-field of the five skandhas” and “impure thing.”73 Given its literati and imperial patronage during the Song dynasty, Chan’s call for spontaneous naturalness and use of iconoclastic words and practices are not incompatible with established social-political life and can indeed reflect the mythic and ideological autonomy and self-stylized sensibilities of social-elites.74 Chan often although not inevitably has had a conservative social role throughout East Asia.75 The radicality of Chan Buddhism only develops in relation to the social-political conditions as well as the doctrinal, devotional, and ritual contexts of Buddhism that have produced it. This historical claim does not rule out that these conditions can themselves be transformed into questions through Chan destructuring practices.76 Chan’s behavioral and linguistic practices challenge conventional understanding for the sake of a transformation of a person’s comportment and disposition. These practices can enact an emptying and desacralization of what is popularly understood as sacred in order to point back to the “one great matter” (yidashi ϔ໻џ): “There is only you, followers of the Way, this person in front of my eyes now listening to the dharma …”77 In another instance illustrating how Linji’s Chan aims at shifting perspectives, Linji is described as forbidding travel to Mount Wutai (Wutai Shan Ѩ㟎ቅ), where popular devotional Buddhists believed the Bodhisattva Mañjuśrī appeared.78 Linji’s Mañjuśrī cannot be seen on a sacred mountain, it is revealed, because he is manifested in the performative enactment of one’s activity and practice. However, there is more going on than this recentering in one’s own heart-mind in the Linji yulu 㞼△䁲䣘 (Recorded

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Sayings of Linji): there are episodes portraying Linji’s ambiguous success in dealing with Puhua ᱂࣪, an eccentric esoteric practitioner of crazy wisdom attributed with magical powers, who Linji strives to yet cannot quite expose.79 Despite Linji’s warnings, the sacred mountain of the bodhisattva of compassion continued to appeal to ordinary believers and Chan practitioners. In these encounter dialogues, which became the basis of various gong’an, Chan is not as exclusively demythologizing or secularizing as a modern reader might wish. Linji’s Chan plays a dangerous game of ironic ambiguity and reversal that might lead to the freedom of transversing perspectives. Chan is not only desacralizing, it recognizes a degree of validity in other approaches and practices, as well as retaining its own moment of sacralization, while opening them and itself to their own fundamental non-substantial and self-emptying emptiness. Linji’s practice of Chan might be described as having its own form of methodological atheism, reinterpreting all images and idols in relation to the question of one’s own way of living in the present moment. The secularization and demystification involved in Heidegger’s “methodological atheism,” which is being reapplied to Heidegger’s own thinking of the nothing in this chapter insofar as it too is empty of itself, separates philosophy from faith (Glaube)— even as Heidegger asserts that faith as faith remains beyond and irreducible to the immanence of philosophical questioning. Destructuring (Destruktion) must struggle to renew itself in its enactment (Vollzug) and confrontation (Auseinandersetzung) with what has been handed down and solidified, and accordingly demands “a genuine confrontation with the history that we ourselves ‘are.’”80 Heidegger and Hongzhou/Linji Chan partake in a strategy that is partially analogous. This very existence is the “great issue” of concern and transformation. Chan “destructuring” and “authenticity” disclose what is “already” at play and the destructuring transcendence or transformation of everydayness remains immanent within the everyday existence of the ordinary mind that is itself the Way (pingchang xin shi dao ᑇᐌᖗᰃ䘧). Heidegger’s Dasein (existence in its temporal and worldly being-there) is ecstatic or transcendent in the sense of standing out in the world, irrupting amid beings. It surpasses the world as formative of world yet does not transcend the world in the sense of departure to another realm. This worldly transcendence is not derivative of intentionality, selfhood, or subjectivity but grounds the deep structures of the subject.81 Dasein cannot be restricted to the immanence of consciousness or perception, the subject or the “I,” even as it exists within worldly immanence as precisely this “each time one’s own” (jemeinig) “being-inthe-world” (in-der-Welt-sein).82

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In contrast with the attitude of faith, which Heidegger described as a believing, revealing, and way of existing that does not arise spontaneously or immanently from and through Dasein itself, it is you yourself that is in each case in question in philosophizing; just as it is your own mind that is the great issue for Buddhist practice.83 What the Chan practices of Mazu and Linji transform is not the mind, as an independent entity, but how the mind relates to itself amid the myriad things, whether it mirrors things as a free responding to phenomena or is reactively absorbed in and attached to things.84 The point of emptying attachment and aversion is neither to be entangled in or turned around by things nor lost in their emptiness. One ought not be attached to and hindered by the Buddha himself in awakening to one’s condition.85 Authenticity in the self-transcendence of the conventional attached self is a modification rather than elimination of inauthenticity and the ordinary absorption in things. “We are,” Heidegger stated, “overwhelmed and spellbound by beings,” and Chan performative strategies aim at therapeutically breaking the spell.86 Both authenticity and inauthenticity are modes or transformed and individuated variations of the same everydayness. Instead of opposites or different worlds, in The Concept of Time authenticity is the realization of one’s constant inauthenticity and inevitable complicity with the ordinary mundane world that Buddhism identifies with karma. As self-relating finitude confronted by infinity, Dasein can only be at best authentically inauthentic or inauthentically authentic: “The authentic being of Dasein is what it is only insofar as it is inauthentically authentic, that is, ‘preserved’ in itself. [Authenticity] is not anything that should or could exist for itself next to the inauthentic.”87 One Hongzhou formulation borrowed from Nāgārjuna states that nirvana is samsara and samsara nirvana (shengsi ji niepan ⫳⅏े⍙ᾗ), just as suffering is awakening (fannao ji puti ✽ᛅे㦽ᦤ). The discovery of what is in each case already happening, to use a phenomenological expression, is repeatedly emphasized by Linji, as in his retelling of a tale of Yajnadatta, the madman from Śrāvastī, from the Śūraṅgama Sūtra (Dafo dingshou lengyan jing shelun ໻ԯ䷖ 佪ἲಈ㍧᫱䂪): “A man of old tells us that Yajnadatta thought he had lost his head and went looking for it, but once he had put a stop to his seeking mind, he found he was perfectly all right.”88 As in the Bodhisattva’s non-appearance on Mt. Wutai, what we seek is not external to us.89 Seeking intrinsically means not to find since it means already distancing and losing what is sought in Linji’s logic.90 Chan elucidates the inadequacy of language through language to phenomenologically and responsively express the truth of the matter, with its emphasis on a transmission from mind to mind outside of the scriptures and its

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perception of awakening as a lightning bolt that illuminates the mind. This play occurs within a set of historical conditions. Welter elucidates the internal Buddhist and external worldly political dimensions of such claims without reducing them to their political contexts, as claims to transmission establish lineage and authority as well as potential truth and authenticity91, especially “given Chan’s insistence upon lineage affiliation as the basis for legitimacy …”92 Welter demonstrates how lineage, ideology, and doctrine do not necessarily overlap, and how their intersections become contested sites for reinterpreting and creating the past.93 Chan’s deconstructive and postmodern critics stress its instrumental view of language,94 and the flawed character of its “rhetoric of immediacy.”95 Wright and Faure reject the idea that, in the words of Bodhidharma and other masters, one can use words to get beyond words (chaoyue wenzi de huayu 䍙䍞᭛ᄫⱘ 䁅䁲) and forget them in doing so.96 The practice of Buddhism is a vehicle that destructures itself in its being enacted for oneself, as “self-practice is the practice of the Buddha” and being the Buddha is the very practice of the Buddha.97 Practices, including linguistic ones, constitute the path and being-underway that is itself awakening. This performative rather than instrumental use of language entails that language is not a means to a nonlinguistic mystical exteriority transcending the world. As each time self-enacting, and potentially transformative, Chan practices are not best thought of as a form of mysticism much less fideism. It does not posit or set the subject in relation to an intransitive absolute; it dissolves the substantial subject whether interpreted through the unity of the one or the many. The encounter with and transformation through emptiness is crucial to Chan, yet it is not itself the purpose or absolute. Emptiness cannot be interpreted according to the classical Christian philosophical conception of nothing as the negation or privation of being, or its modern ontotheological—including logical positivist—successors. In the Chan context, Zongmi interprets emptiness as a provisional negation to be relativized as a negative means inadequate to the ultimate positive soteriological end of becoming a Buddha.98 The Essentials of the Transmission of Mind (Huangbo shan Duanji chanshi chuanxin fayao 咗ቅ ᮋ䱯⽾᏿‫ڇ‬ᖗ⊩㽕), attributed to Huangbo, offers a different account, where emptiness is an abyss without limit or obstruction. It is not to be construed nihilistically by being instrumentalized as purely negative and derivative or rejected as a mere nothing and void. It is necessary to attend to the context and sense of discourses of emptiness. In Huangbo’s discourse, the dharma does not signify that there are “no things”; it is a freedom and ease in relation to things. It is not being dependent on causes and things in the midst of their interdependent conditionality.99 Emptiness is

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spoken of as the source of being and nothing, mind and no-mind, and compared to the empty sky, empty hand, or the clarity of infinite empty space.100 Emptiness is fundamentally emptying; it is not an entity or something to be construed as an absolute reality that could be the object of a pure intuition or experience.101 It is itself empty, and in need of dereification through its own emptying in unsaying. Heidegger’s abyssal groundlessness of the ground, the non-essence that informs essence, approaches this conditionless condition.102 Being itself self-empty, emptiness attracts and repels language, as can be traced in the long multicultural history of the apophatic and dialetheist saying and unsaying of words. Chan employs a performative language of indication, of gestures and hints, rather than a conceptualizing and categorizing language of explanation. Dale Wright describes how its language is performative rather than referential, while Jin Y. Park has elucidated the soteriological context and function of Zen Buddhist language games.103 Chan accordingly makes language useful for intimating that which seems beyond language, as its long intense history of literary production demonstrates. The poetic and paradoxical uses of language, indicating what is other than language and what is ultimately the same (if there is no entity or thing existing beyond the event of encounter and communication), require that Chan games and warnings be directed against the fixation of words and being transfixed by language: “genuine mind is not fixed, and genuine wisdom is not bounded.”104 The call to “go beyond” is taken back in Chan with the assertion that there is no beyond to which to go, as each person is already sufficient without needing augmentation or diminishment.105 Just now, one is already there, and “this very inescapability itself is mediation.”106 Chan contains a double movement of transcending any absorption in ordinary daily life and responding to it in its immanence—empty and clear, spontaneously aware and responsive with untroubled mind in encountering and responding to situations, people, and circumstances.107 It means “not to forget the matter of birth and death while in the midst of the passions of the world.”108 The way is not mystical or mysterious but rather described as being without difficulty. It is “perfect and complete right under everyone’s feet” and “pure and naked in the midst of everyday activities.”109 Since language is self-deconstructing in Chan without there being a primordial something or experience standing outside the self-reproduction and deconstruction of language, there is nothing to cling to and calculate. Using without being absorbed in words and interpretations, as there is no ultimate definition or account that can be provided in words, Chan challenges and brings into question clinging to the language that one uses, including self-reflexively the language of non-clinging.110 The question that concerns us is the language of

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experience and the experience rather than a negation of language. The issue is our own being or mind and not “Being” or “Mind.” The self-destructuring of language and experience, that is their self-emptying, occurs through a variety of means—from the shout and the stick to the aporia and double-edged bind of the gong’an. These work to disturb experience and language by showing their very uncanniness in Heidegger and their interdependent, impermanent, and empty character in Chan. Chan Buddhism’s “mind to mind transmission” (yi xin chuan xin ҹᖗ‫ڇ‬ᖗ) reveals the necessity of speaking otherwise. According to Dahui, “Today I speak this way, but then tomorrow I’ll speak otherwise … Where will you search out my abiding place? Since I myself don’t even know, how can anyone else find where I stay?”111 The free, flexible, and creative use of indirect language is a primary feature. The richness and variety of Chan ways of speaking are not due to duplicity but to the communicative and self-deconstructing event of Chan awakening. If enlightenment is situational, and consequently irreducible to a formula or rule, if it requires one’s own enactment of it, then another cannot give it. The master evokes it through a flexible intrigue of words and gestures. Enacting individuation without a fixed or unconditional self, the other’s awakening is on each occasion the other’s own. T. Griffith Foulk notes of kōan practice, awakening consists in the dereification and demystification of the master and the master’s words.112 There is no “transmission” of mind, or any other content; there is a provocation to a mutual enactment of the event of enlightenment. Awakening can neither be given nor imposed. It is a resourceful engagement and appropriation that calls for letting go and emptying in order to be non-intentionally responsive to the suchness of things.113 “Just as they are,” according to Seosan, “effortlessly responding to conditions”; letting go of thoughts and conditions, “spring comes, and grass grows all by itself,” and “everything is the same true suchness, as it is, and yet everything is clearly distinct.”114 In his interpretation of Huangbo, Wright argues that no-self implies the practice of letting go, which is an opening up to the encounter, and spontaneous compassionate responsiveness.115

From an aporetic point of view [I]t belongs much more to the sense of philosophical concepts that they always remain uncertain.—Martin Heidegger116 Hongzhou Chan—the variety of Chan that shaped the formation of the encounter dialogue and subsequent gong’an practice—maintains that “ordinary mind is the

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Way” and that “this mind is the Buddha” (shixin shi fo ᰃᖗᰃԯ).117 Awakening is not detached from but found in the ordinary activities of life, “seeing, listening, sensing, and knowing are fundamentally your original nature.”118 Mazu Daoyi described this ordinary mind as meaning “no intentional creation or action, no right or wrong, no grasping or rejecting, no terminable or permanent, no profane or holy … Now all these are just the Way: walking, abiding, sitting, lying, responding to conditions, and handling matters.”119 Mazu portrays a holistic world of connectedness without absorption: “Though the dharma is not attached to anything, every phenomenon one has contact with is thusness.”120 Layman Pang (Pang Yun 啤㯞) is said to have stated: “My supernatural power and marvelous activity—Drawing water and carrying firewood.”121 Instead of some sense of the supernatural as extraordinary, he remarked: “My daily activities are not unusual. I’m just naturally in harmony with them. Grasping nothing, discarding nothing, in every place there is no hindrance, no conflict.”122 For Dahui, the marvelous and others’ marvels misleads, as the great issue (dashi ໻џ) is not supernatural or sacred but “this mind” (cixin ℸᖗ).123 To achieve “silent accord with your own fundamental mind; you don’t have to seek special excellence or extraordinary wonders besides.”124 Dahui asked “What is there outside this lump of flesh? What can you hold to be wonderful, mysterious, or marvelous?” All this is already empty; there is no ground to fear emptiness or falling into absolute nothingness (xuwu 㰯⛵).125 Heidegger examines in Being and Time human existence from the perspective of everydayness, what it does and how it lives usually and for the most part. One interpretation of authenticity is that it is a transformation of one’s disposition or comportment toward everydayness. Both emphasize everyday practice in this sense, and the transformative shocks or breakthroughs that potentially modifies them. In Heidegger, it is not sacred enchantment but uncanniness—the anxious dread in the face of one’s inescapable death that cannot be mastered or appropriated. In Chan, it can be a sequence of physical jolts and verbal twists directed at a conversion or modification of the everyday self, since one is already in each case awakened. This turn to the self through the lack of self, the “no-self ” (Skt. anātman; wuwo ⛵៥) or the destructuring of ordinary self-conceptions, is provoked through speaking otherwise through the “living words” (shengyu 㘪䁲) of the abusive, paradoxical, poetic, shocking, and tautological strategies unfolded in Chan Buddhism. These strategies are not efforts to block or forbid doubt through a belief but—akin to Heidegger’s emphasis on lingering in the question and the uncanniness of the nothing— to intensify it into the “great doubt” that through focus and commitment is

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the occasion of self-awakening.126 Instead of emphasizing its ease, the Korean Seon master Hyujeong ӥ䴰 known as Seosan Taesa 㽓ቅ໻᏿ (1520–1604) compares it to a mosquito biting an impenetrable iron statue. Dahui—a figure who is closely associated with the development of kanhua ⳟ䁅 or gong’an introspection meditation on the crucial phase or punch line (huatou 䁅丁) that creates doubt—describes the one suchness of mind and things as requiring “an abrupt, complete break.”127 Without fearing or fixating emptiness, or creating new entities via it as early analytic philosophy dreaded of Heidegger’s nothing, “this very lack of anywhere to get a grip is the time for you to let go of your body and life.”128 Dahui advocates intensifying and radicalizing one’s doubt: “Take your own constant point of doubt and stick it on your forehead.”129 In the worst of moments, when your mind “seems bewildering and stifling and flavorless, as if you are gnawing on an iron spike, this is just the time to apply effort …”130 Dahui portrayed this as “a sudden leap within the fires of birth and death,” in which one leaps out “without moving a hairsbreadth.”131 As in Zhuangzi, an important source for Chan Buddhist strategies and rhetoric, death is neither mastered nor anxiously feared for Dahui. Death is another moment to be traversed in the transformation of things: “[N]ot knowing where we come from at birth and not knowing where we go at death,” there is no escape and nothing to be found.132 The interruptive force of uncanniness, the abyssal, and the remaining within and inability to escape from the question and one’s own fundamental questionability, is an essential trope for Heidegger during this period. He employs the language of horror, the sublime, or the uncanny as an experience which discloses something fundamentally different about ourselves. Wright maintains that the strangeness and disruption of the conventional and ordinary are two forms of Chan rhetoric.133 One sees the uncanny and shocking in Chan when Linji speaks of murdering Buddha and parents, Huangbo describes the terrors of “being suspended over an infinite void, groundless, with nothing to hold on to,” or in Chan depictions of the “great death” that destructures ordinary understandings of life and death.134 Chan employs its own dramatic and paradoxical language and use of physical surprises like shouting and hitting during the encounter between master and student. There is in each case the disruption of the ordinary flow of experience, a “cutting off ” of the habitual and customary succession of thought and practice in order to make, according to Huineng ᚴ㛑 (638–713), “non-abiding the basis or fundamental” (wuzhu wei ben ⛵ԣ⚎ᴀ).135

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In a passage attributed to Mazu, it is claimed: “Responding to things, [the dharma-body] manifests itself in [many] shapes like the reflection of the moon in water. It functions constantly without establishing a root.”136 Rootlessness is responsiveness, as one can “function responsively without losing balance.”137 It is by cutting off the flow of habits that ordinary persons perceive their own sagehood.138 That is, as in the Xinming ᖗ䡬 of Niutou Farong ⠯丁⊩㵡 (594–657) in the Jingde chuandenglu ᱃ᖋ‫➜ڇ‬䣘, “just now non-abiding, just now original mind” (jian zai wu zhu jian zai ben xin 㽟೼⛵ԣˈ㽟೼ᴀᖗ).139 The root mind (benxin ᴀᖗ) is not an isolated essence, substance, or foundation, as the Chinese word ben ᴀ implies the rooted or interconnected ground from which things sprout, i.e., a ground that is already plural while being dynamically one in being mutually and non-dually interrelated.140 The denial of habitually lingering in dwelling and abiding, including dwelling in non-dwelling, is challenged by the spontaneous and responsive yet nonhabitual practice of undermining one’s habitual practices. In this sense it is “sudden.” It is breaking through one’s attachments in order to achieve what is not an achievement, namely what Huineng calls no-thought, no-form, no-abiding. It is seeing without being disturbed and a letting occur.141 Dahui describes Chan as an immanent looking and observing: “Just look right here, don’t seek transcendent enlightenment. Just observe and observe.”142 This basic letting is a fundamental responsiveness that is only possible based on the recognition of the emptiness and immanent self-manifestation of the suchness of things. Huineng is said to state: “From the outset the dharma has been in the world; being in the world, it transcends the world. Hence do not seek the transcendent world outside, by discarding the present world itself.”143 Chan Buddhism indirectly through various strategies from the anecdotal to the shocking enacts a reorientation of human “dwelling.” Beyond Heidegger’s language of being at home and homelessness, dwelling is found to be nonabiding or a free and easy dwelling without support. In non-abiding, empty illumination manifests itself (wu chu anxin xu ming zi lu ⛵㰩ᅝᖗ㰮ᯢ 㞾䴆).144 There is a recurring reminder against reification not to abide and cling here either. Non-abiding signifies letting the Way or Dharma circulate freely, without reifying the dharma itself through attachment and calculation, and what indeed should impede it?145 Heidegger challenges reification in articulating the fundamental lack of ground of human existence and of a dwelling or abiding appropriate to this groundlessness and conditionality of each ground and condition.

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The self-destructuring of emptiness ᳝ेᰃ⛵⛵ेᰃ᳝DŽ What is [is] what is not; what is not [is] what is.146  Chan emptiness and Heidegger’s nothingness approach each other in emphasizing the originary groundlessness and temporal impermanence of human existence while articulating different and incompatible philosophical intentions and forms of emancipation as is clear from the analysis of Heidegger’s thinking in previous chapters. Heidegger’s nothingness is not negative, as we have seen; it is the condition for the negativity that makes human thought and practices possible. Buddhist emptiness is not pure negativity. It is not a mere abstract void, as it is comparable to the infinite openness of space and sky and is the condition of the fecund multiplicity of things and their encounters. Emptiness is accordingly not nothing, nor the threat or realization of annihilation; it is the openness of liberation itself.147 Emptiness goes beyond the doctrinal affirmation and reification of difference and the other in embracing the multiplicity of the myriad or 10,000 things, each of which is a great teacher and expresses truth.148 Against the affirmation of the trace, Linji—or his radicalized Song redescription—would leave without a trace; the trace is never found and none is left behind. What Dale Wright has described as a “spontaneous responsiveness without end” is achieved in Chan by the emptying of fixed characteristics and the rejection of a self-subsistent pure mind or self-nature (zixing 㞾ᗻ).149 Expressions such as “Buddha nature” (foxing ԯᗻ) and “original mind” (benxin ᴀᖗ) might appear more metaphysical than deconstructive. Youru Wang has portrayed how Huineng challenges Shenxiu’s ⼲⾔ reification of the originary mind through emphasizing the free-flowing happening of thoughts and things. Huineng playfully opens up zixing (self-nature) in order to undermine the possibility of fixing it such that his no-thought resists being reduced to either the presence or absence of thought or mind. Hongzhou Chan’s relational and pragmatic deployment of apophatic and kataphatic language deconstructs Shenxiu’s reification so as to responsively be attuned with the spontaneous and immanent movement of things (renyun ӏ䘟). The self-destructuring of the awakening mind is illustrated in Mazu’s “neither mind nor Buddha” (wuxin wufo ⛵ᖗ⛵ԯ); Huangbo’s articulation of the fluid play and mutuality of originary and ordinary mind; and Linji’s ironic self-erasure of the primary terms of his discourse such as the authentic person without rank, the mind, and extending to the Bodhisattvas and Buddhas.150

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Buddhist emptiness enacts non-intentional—that is, purposive without a purpose—responsiveness toward things in their spontaneous naturalness and unexpectedness rather than the reiterated belief in arbitrary human will and power seen in the various forms of constructivism of Western thought.151 Perhaps the responsiveness promised in Heidegger’s Gelassenheit and in Levinas’s “ethics of the other” approximates this comportment, even though their accounts of letting releasement and ethical recognition do not extend to the limitless responsive generosity and compassion toward beings, human and nonhuman, of the Bodhisattva. Linji is said to claim that the great universal wisdom of the Buddha “refers to you yourselves who, wherever you are, understand that the ten thousand things have no innate nature and no characteristics.”152 The great issue or matter then is not nothing. Apophatic language concerning nothingness and emptiness should not be reified anymore than being or mind. It is not about nothing as nothing (annihilation) and not about nothing as some thing or entity (another being or thing)—both miss the point insofar as eliminating phenomena creates a reified absolute. The amoral and nihilistic interpretations ignore the multiple critiques of the “fault of annihilation” in paradigmatic Zen texts and fail to address the worldly and ethical aspects of Chan awakening.153 Emptiness is compared to space cleared of objects or the sky of clouds and solar phenomena, allowing things to be seen clearly.154 Emptiness in this sense can be linked to what the early Heidegger called formal indication (formale Anzeige). According to the method—an opening method with the task of overcoming the limitations of method—of formal indication, the more empty the concept, the more open it can be to the concreteness and richness of the phenomena, as long as formalization remains tied to encountering—yet not absorbed in—facticity and its variations.155 This emptying does not signify a retreat from phenomena for Heidegger, as it is deformalized into individual and concrete ways of understanding.156 Dasein’s realization of its non-absorbed distance from things allows it to listen and respond to them.157 Facticity refers to that which disturbs human comportment and responsiveness. It is the rejection and pain that confound the emotions, the resistance that humbles the will, the remains and historical ruins of the world that cannot be integrated into the present, and the breakdowns throwing utility and pragmatic usefulness into doubt. Purposive behavior is challenged by the non-purposeful and intractable. Meaning is conditioned by non-meaning, by experiences of the lack, disruption, and failure of meaning. This occurs at fundamentally different levels from the faulty hammer to the closure of Dasein’s

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own most possibilities in the common life of das Man (i.e., the sociality of the “they” or the “one” who is anyone and no one in particular), from Dasein’s relation to being as the radical lack of ground to the “nothing” which resists being ordered into and disturbs systems of concepts and propositions. The confrontation with death in the anticipation of one’s own death enables human existence as Dasein to differentiate and individuate itself. Resoluteness, however, means to remain within this determinate-indeterminate nearing of death. In this movement toward authenticity, Dasein cannot step out of the finitude, pain, and suffering that is the condition of its existence as being-there in the world amid things with others. Facticity intimates the problematic nature of assumptions about intelligibility, meaningfulness and teleological purposiveness, and the emptying involved in formalizing is the most appropriate response. Emptiness is formally indicative rather than explanatory of or referential to the concrete in Heidegger. The destructuring movement from the “false concreteness” of the indifferent absorption in the phenomenon to letting beings occur is for Heidegger a free engaging and encountering of beings.158 Heidegger contrasted responsive letting, which heeds the incalculable, with calculation and compulsion.159 This letting-be-encountered is made possible by the primordial activity of the being-there of Dasein, already described in 1928/1929 as the openness of letting beings be (Seinlassen des Seienden) and as the releasement into beings of Gelassenheit.160 Formal indication, as emptying and distancing in order to open up and let beings be, provides another point of access to the distancing from absorption in things that is the openness of phenomena.

Destructuring the communicative event  㾎⛵㾎ⳳぎϡぎDŽ ℷ  Genuine awakening is not awakening; genuine emptiness is not empty.161 Linji is said to describe emptiness as a requirement of the excess and fullness of all things and as oneness without the one.162 Given that emptiness is one, and the one emptiness is itself empty, instead of being a monistic and mystical selfabsorption in the one, emptiness is the one suchness (yiru ϔབ) and the means to liberation from fear and attachment for the sake of realizing the ethical condition of unlimited generosity and compassion, which ought to be interpreted as an elemental responsiveness that is non-dual without presupposing a static monistic identity or unity: a one that already entails many. The strategies of destructuring

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indicated in Chan sources are themselves to be destructured, since one cannot cling to emptiness, non-clinging, and the paradoxical and poetic use of language. Skeptical dissolution is not the end or goal of such discourses. This non-skepticism is not due to there being an essence or reified something that doubt cannot touch, but because it is itself fundamentally empty such that one can neither grasp it nor reject it and throw away.163 Neither existence nor nonexistence can be grasped, and even its “ungraspability itself cannot be grasped.”164 The paradox, the question, the self-dismantling qualities of language are themselves empty and are in need of being performatively and existentially shaken up and uprooted so that they do not become fixated objects of attachment.165 Only in such ways might the path not become an obstacle to wandering the path.166 As evident from the “skeptical” destructuring and self-questioning strategies of Chan, Buddhism can involve challenging ordinary beliefs, habits, and practices. It can enact through the strategy of emptiness a “de-structuring” of reified structures or the built up nests that make us miss “this matter,” which is a question of our own existence.167 Chan strategies and tactics do not aim at producing a state of doubt or negatively defined “nothingness” but via the illuminating clarity of emptiness that grants an exposure to and encounter with the phenomena themselves (faru ⊩བ) in the midst of phenomena (fazhong ⊩Ё) and among human beings (renzhong ҎЁ) to occur. The enowning/disowning—or “appropriating”/“dispropriating”—non-ontic happening of the event (Ereignis), which Heidegger (problematically from a Buddhist perspective given the reality of dependent arising) describes as being irreducible to ontic occurrences or the causal nexus, of the self-manifestation of things is powerfully formulated in Chinese Chan and Japanese Zen. For example, as discussed in Chapter 7, Dōgen addressed the self-blossoming of the world as it is and in its suchness, and the liberation and non-abiding of things as an abiding in their own phenomenal expression without, however, abandoning the dependent arising and interdependence of the world.168 The resonance and tension between Chan self-blossoming and Heidegger’s language of physis (φύσις) as upsurge and holding sway are revealing. Heidegger and Hongzhou/ Linji Chan Buddhism consequently suggest two divergent yet partially and incompletely akin ways of immanently encountering and addressing the world from out of itself through moments of nothingness and emptiness that are less and more than negative and derivative logical fictions. In conclusion, it should be noted how Krzysztof Ziarek proposes ways in which Heidegger’s own language performatively distinguishes words (Worte) and dictionary terms or word-signs (Wörter) in his work Language After

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Heidegger, that is between the “word of being” and “language signs.”169 Heidegger differentiated between hint (Wink) and trace (Spur) in The History of Being (Die Geschichte des Seyns) and in Besinnung.170 Being (Sein) is traceless (spurloss) because nothingness pulses in and through it. Heidegger explicitly distanced his approach to language, being, and the nothing from any kind of theology and mysticism in a number of works at different points in his intellectual sojourn.171 This elucidation of language helps elucidate the sense of Chan’s destructuring words and word play in perfomatively enacting “wordless words.”

Conclusion: Heidegger and intercultural hermeneutics Heidegger, as noted repeatedly in chapters in this work, had a fruitful albeit partial encounter and engagement with East Asian thought, specifically Daoism and Chan/Zen Buddhism. Despite the limits of Heidegger’s approach to Asian thought, such as his essentialist conceptions of philosophy and thinking and the “Occident” and the “Orient,” his philosophy offers a genuine point of departure for dialogue and a more adequate intercultural thinking contesting and freely wandering beyond the self-imposed borders and great walls of modern Western philosophy. In this chapter, we have traced how Heidegger reversed the standard Western account by recognizing that the nothing is not derivative and note merely negative, presupposing beings/Being. This thinking of the nothing resonates with Daoist nothingness and Chan/Zen Buddhist emptiness. It may or may not be inspired by his early reading of Daoist texts. The nothing is not another something; it is not and, as not, is the abyssal non-ground (abyss) opening up being (Sein) as openness and the clearing (Lichtung); the invisible that grants things being seen, and silence that grants speaking and hearing. The clearing or openness of being is an emptiness in which things disclose themselves from themselves and call us to receptively see, listen, and respond. The early Heidegger articulated formale Anzeige (formal indication) as a method of formalizing and emptying things and situations, and accordingly being captured in particularity and the absorption in concrete situations and beliefs, which allows things to be encountered in their interconnected uniqueness. Heidegger would turn from the language of formal indication to the language of way (Wege) and Gelassenheit. Gelassenheit, translated as letting be or as releasement, is rooted in Meister Eckhart and the medieval German mystical discourses. It was used to elucidate wuwei in the German reception

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of classical Daoism. Releasing and letting be are passive and as passive can be a responsiveness to things in the context of the clearing in which beings disclose themselves. Being and nothingness are not interpreted as functions of predication (as in Carnap), or as static metaphysical essences and structures (as in traditional metaphysics), but as the occurrence of being’s communicative event (Ereignis) in its saying and silence. Heidegger’s strategies echo the destructuring letting through nothingness and emptiness of Daoist and Chan Buddhist discourses. There are good reasons to suspect that Heidegger’s reading of East Asian sources and his discussions with East Asian students, colleagues, and visitors can be heard in his writings. Heidegger interpreted these concepts primarily through Western culture and philosophy. Our own contemporary intercultural hermeneutical situation is different than Heidegger’s; it requires a different comportment in encountering questions and sources from diverse provenance and in articulating a more adequate intercultural hermeneutics. Heidegger’s reversal of the Western denigration of the nothing remains a significant moment in the history of Western philosophy’s opening to Eastern philosophy. Heidegger’s articulation of philosophy, language, and existence in relation to the nothing and its own questionability—despite Heidegger’s philosophical and political failures and his Eurocentric philosophy of history articulated in previous chapters—is pertinent to the intercultural hermeneutics that would think with and beyond his art of interpretation; we too must face our limits and finitude. One systematizing meta-language from which different encounters with the nothing and emptiness could be categorized and systematized is lacking. There is only the space and the silence in which encounters occur and are missed. As Heidegger indicated in his dialogue with a Japanese visitor, genuine understanding cannot mean the erasure of what is singular and unique; words allow for each to be granted its own appropriate due and measure. We ought to be accordingly cautious and reticent in claiming that we understand the other and that which we do not and perhaps cannot understand.

Conclusion: Toward an Intercultural Philosophy

Concerning a critical intercultural hermeneutics The phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty posed the question in “Everywhere and Nowhere” (“Partout et nulle part,” 1956), an essay written as an introduction to a collection of texts from “world philosophers,” of how philosophy can be in a position to evaluate what can and cannot be included in the category of philosophy: how can one gain a vantage point to say definitively what is and what is not philosophy?1 He comments: “… since we lack the comprehensive witness who would reduce them to a common denominator, how could we possibly see one single philosophy developing through different philosophers?” MerleauPonty skeptically engages the Hegelian problem of whether the philosopher can access one perspective or system that could incorporate, preserve, and integrate (deploying Hegel’s notion of Aufhebung), all other moments of thought through the labor of determinate negation, immanent critique, and dialectical synthesis. Merleau-Ponty contends that when we endeavor to “go beyond” a philosophy “from within” in immanent dialectical critique, we cut its heart out by doing so. We contemporary philosophers insult the other philosophy by “retaining” it through subordination in a reduced purified form without what we have deemed in “understanding better” its failures and limitations, that is, without its own words and concepts that made it what it was for those who thought and understand it. To expand and revise Merleau-Ponty’s argument, we speak as if the insights of Heraclitus and Laozi, the flow of Descartes’s Meditations and the humor of the Zhuangzi, could be reduced without loss to the contemporary understanding of the system (to use Hegel’s language) or the most fashionable analytic theory or continental event of truth.2 Merleau-Ponty’s rejoinder attempts to open up Western philosophy to its nonWestern others while retaining a Hegelian framework through his conception

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of an indirect unity of world philosophies: “Each time we shall have to learn anew to bridge the gap between ourselves and the past, between ourselves and the Orient, and between philosophy and religion; and to find an indirect unity.”3 His elucidation of an indirect unity, with a recognition of the ambiguity of the relation between a philosophy and its other and philosophy’s troubled place between prejudice and radical questioning, points toward—without itself adopting—an adequate intercultural critical model and practice of philosophy and interpretation. Wilhelm Dilthey’s philosophy of worldviews (Philosophie der Weltanschauungen) might offer another point of departure for intercultural philosophy. Dilthey pluralistically argued that there are multiple perspectives and worldviews at work in each form of historical life, a revised version of this argument was examined in the comparative work of Georg Misch in Chapters 1 and 5. There is no world without world-formation and cultivation as well as interpretive confrontation and conflict.4 World-picturing enacts and expresses an understanding and “feeling of life” (Lebensgefühl). Due to the plurality of social-historically formed individual perspectives, Dilthey concluded that: “[o] ne objective, determinate, integral system of reality that excludes other possible ones is not demonstrable.”5 There is accordingly in Dilthey’s account no preestablished determinate universal system of judgment or horizon of truth that can be followed and applied to all individuals, societies, states of affairs, and situations. But, as Dilthey argued in his critique of the historical school, historicism and relativism (the embrace of the local and particular without the recognition of the common, general, and universal) would leave interpreters unable to judge, evaluate, diagnose, and criticize. The apparent impasse between totalizing universalism and narrow particularism is resolved by risking communicatively encountering and engaging others by interpreting their expressions as well as practicing a form of self-reflectiveness that, echoing Kant’s portrayal of reflective judgment in the Critique of Judgment, Dilthey and Misch called Selbstbesinnung.6 Rather than automatically subordinating the particular to the ostensive universal, and the nonidentical to the identical, or remaining unreflectively absorbed in particularity, reflection can proceed from the particular—and the rich textures of its situation—toward the universal in order to formulate new more appropriate interpretations and concepts adequate to the phenomena. Local particular experiences, self-understandings, and traditions are conditions of and media for communication, yet they have already been reshaped countless times through historical encounters and communications with other perspectives,

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forms of life, and traditions. No contemporary form of social-historical life has a closed horizon of interpretation, or is without its own multi- and intercultural history of material and communicative reproduction and interaction. Communities are already interculturally formed. They have been and continue to be expanded and revised through the very practices of communication and coming to mutual understanding that constitute communities. Whether there can be an appropriate sense of intercultural community, and an intercultural sensus communis, which avoids the extremes and pitfalls of universalism and particularism, globalization and nationalism, is at this point an unresolved question. The contemporary hermeneutical philosopher Rudolf A. Makkreel has maintained in his recent work committed to a multicultural reinterpretation of hermeneutics, Orientation and Judgment in Hermeneutics, for the necessity of hermeneutics to embrace a multicultural stance given our current multicultural interpretive situation.7 Makkreel’s interpretation moves beyond the parameters of Dilthey’s philosophy of the multiplicity of worldviews to articulate the multicultural character of each form of historical life, which was considered through the concept of the lifeworld in the present work. Makkreel’s multicultural interpretive strategy offers an alternative to conceptions of reconciliation conceived of as a dialectical synthesis (Hegel), a dialogical fusion of horizons (Gadamer), or a new consensus (Habermas). Instead of employing idealized monistic models of dialogue, community, and tradition, which Makkreel argues shapes the hermeneutics of Gadamer and Habermas, interpreters can adopt a different hermeneutical point of departure that allows for and opens up encountering others; that is to say, the recognition and negotiation of the intersections of multiple spheres of life as well as the tensions of divergent and conflicting claims, interests, and traditions that constitute a historical form of life or lifeworld.8 Makkreel’s work does not explicitly address non-Western philosophical texts and intercultural interpretations of hermeneutics. These sources can broaden and enlarge but also significantly reorient Western hermeneutics as argued in the present work. His analysis of modern Western hermeneutics from Kant and Schleiermacher through Dilthey to Gadamer and Habermas indicates why such an intercultural engagement across boundaries and a critical-reflective orientation—which resists being fixated to one uniform space, unifying topology, or topos—across multiple shifting contexts of meaning and topoi is necessary. The articulation of multicultural hermeneutics in Orientation and Judgment in Hermeneutics reveals ways of reconsidering hermeneutics by extending it beyond

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the scope of a decision between universal norms or a particular tradition, formal cognitive validity or the ontological disclosure and horizonal-intersubjective achievement of truth in a horizon or tradition. The chapters of this book, read alongside contributions to hermeneutics such as Makkreel’s, point toward possibilities for a more adequate intercultural hermeneutical practice. To make a further distinction, contemporary hermeneutics needs to be appropriate to the myriad differences of existence (i.e., multicultural) and adequate for the communication and interpretation across differences (i.e., intercultural). Hermeneutics ought to take into consideration the already existing intertextuality of modern Western discourses instead of ahistorically isolating and privileging them. A culturally appropriate and philosophically adequate hermeneutics would begin and continue communicative processes of encountering, engaging, and entering into dialogue with other positions, perspectives, and ways of thinking and living without assuming their intrinsic inferiority (as much of modern Western philosophy and negative Orientalism have done) or a superiority that reifies other discourses by placing them beyond the inter-human realm of communication and critical interpretation (as in affirmative appropriative faddish exoticism and Orientalism).9 Intercultural communication and thinking cannot be left to an anticipated future that does not recognize that it has already been long underway and in which the other, as anticipated, can never begin to be encountered. Heidegger’s “From a Dialogue on Language” with a Japanese interlocutor appropriately warns against the risks of premature assumptions of understanding others and the premature synthesis of Eastern and Western philosophies and cultures that would flatten their differences into a common uniform identity.10 Such a univocal globalized culture would entail the impossibility of the intercultural. But Heidegger’s understandable caution and hesitation takes a step too far, becoming an opposition between the Occident and the Orient and hindering possibilities of intercultural encounter and communication from the opposite direction. The setting of this limitation to communication comes at the heavy cost of projecting encounter and dialogue, which Heidegger is in fact already engaged in with his Japanese and other East Asian visitors, into a distant future that can never arrive. The intercultural is only futural and to come for Heidegger, when in fact it has already occurred through the history of Western philosophy and its interaction with non-Western lifeworlds. Heidegger posits a current limit to intercultural dialogue and the intertextuality of philosophical traditions, and he already exceeds the very limit he wishes to posit in doing so.

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On the way to a critique of Eurocentric reason As this book has endeavored to illustrate, non-Western discourses do have a sense of the universal and the infinite that Husserl and other Western philosophers have claimed is a unique European inheritance.11 To mention a counterexample once again, Zhao Dongming has shown, in a different context, how the Neo-Confucian philosophy of mind can well be interpreted as a discourse of the infinite.12 Due to reasons such as this that have been investigated in the previous chapters, the univocal and monolithic conception of Western reason, and the associated privileging of European ethical life (Hegel’s Sittlichkeit) or the modern Western lifeworld (Lebenswelt in Husserl and Habermas) as the sole culture of reason and the universal, is deeply questionable. This work has accordingly pursued the strategy of provincializing the Eurocentric tendencies of Western philosophy— through a philosophical investigation of examples from the social-historical milieu of the twentieth-century—with the intention of critically emancipating philosophy and reason along with their universal aspirations. Thinking, reflecting, and reasoning occur in myriad ways in multiple cultural and historical contexts, as Chapters 1 and 5 showed though a reconsideration of Misch’s work on intercultural philosophy. Philosophizing with the matter to be thought itself breaks through overly narrow conceptions of philosophy. Philosophy itself resists being restricted and isolated to the history of Western metaphysics, the history of being, or overly narrow modern conceptions of rationality and logic that make them purely technical theoretical affairs. The idea of one privileged modern Western life-nexus (Lebenszusammenhang) or lifeworld (Lebenswelt), grounding and grounded in science and technology, has proven itself to be an illusion. The notion of the lifeworld can be decolonized by recognizing the provinciality and non-universality of the Western lifeworld as one singular formation among multiple others. As the European philosophers Husserl and Habermas themselves admitted, there are myriad forms of life and multiple lifeworlds. What was harder for them to recognize, given a philosophy of history that hierarchically ranked societies from the “primitive” to Western modernity, was the rationality and potential for reflection inherent in the communication and reproduction of each form of practical life. Each lifeworld has its own (1) processes of material and communicative reproduction; (2) possibilities for argumentation, conceptualization, communication, debate, interpretation, and reflection; (3) pathologies, dysfunctions, imbalances of power, and destructive tendencies. There are furthermore (4) the boundaries of individual and collective understanding, and the limits of discourse and language explored through questions of nothingness and emptiness in Chapter 8, as disclosed

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in limit-situations of crisis, decentering, and—in Misch’s language examined in Chapters 1 and 5—“breakthrough” (Durchbruch).13 A satisfactory conception of intercultural hermeneutics must be more than relativistic and multicultural in (1) exercising a non-identitarian sympathy and a non-reductive charity in understanding and interpretation to discover the internal rationality in other ways of thinking and living; (2) taking into consideration the complex and plural fabric of divergent and conflicting claims, perspectives, and tendencies at work in each lifeworld; and (3) engaging in, and not abandoning, the critical and diagnostic aspects of philosophy in appropriately exercising a hermeneutics of suspicion and materially oriented ideology critique against the structurally reproduced pathologies, injustices, and distortions within a lifeworld. These elements entail rejecting the overly narrow conception of the lifeworld articulated in Husserl and Habermas insofar as the modern Western lifeworld cannot be taken as the definitive model of each lifeworld, or form of historical life, and the distinction between systems and lifeworld is itself questionable by bifurcating the two and preventing the recognition of how the lifeworld itself reproduces both communication and domination. As argued in Chapter 2, to reintroduce an informative example, Zhang Junmai’s reconstruction of a progressive New Confucianism is a significant example of and model for critical and diagnostic intercultural interpretation. Based on the humanistic tendencies of Confucian philosophy, interpreted in relation to contemporary Western thought, Zhang confronted its ethical failures, the complexity of its present conditions, and its critical and Enlightening potential for the future. Zhang’s modern Confucian discourse indicates ways of reinterpreting the problematic of rationalization, modernity, and the lifeworld in a less Eurocentric manner. This historical-philosophical study has been written in the endeavor to offer readers (1) a clear and concise account of the context, motivations, and hermeneutical strategies of early twentieth-century European thinkers’ interpretation of Chinese and Buddhist philosophy; (2) a historical and contextual approach to the understanding of philosophy as Western and the possibility of a more encompassing intercultural conception of philosophy; and (3) an examination of issues and problems of intercultural communication and understanding through concrete intertextual case studies. We have traced in this work the early-twentieth-century German philosophical reception, as well as the larger context of relevant ideas and figures in Germany and China, of Chinese and Buddhist thought. This project was pursued through an “internal” immanent critique and an “external” exposure to alterity and exteriority, as a moment toward an intercultural understanding, in order to problematize

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prevalent modern Western discourses of philosophy and hermeneutics. A critique of the Eurocentric idea of reason is one step in articulating alternative—more interculturally sensitive and appropriate—conceptions of rationality, philosophy, and hermeneutics. The intercultural turn is not a rejection of the pursuit of reason or truth, it is a call for them to be truer to their own vocation and potential. The intercultural turn is all the more needful in a time facing the revival and institutionalization of racialist and nationalist ideologies. It is, moreover, needful within the Western academic discipline of philosophy that is complicit with racism and nationalism insofar as it excludes, ignores, and trivializes the philosophizing and reasoning occurring—in the past and the present—across the globe in places such as Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, as well as East Asia.

A Gingko leaf: An image between one and two Generations of peoples across East and West have already encountered and engaged with one another to one extent or another in ordinary everyday discourse and practice. As Driesch noted within the limitations of his own vocabulary, intercultural communication, hybridity, and interaction have shaped the past and present in which we live and think to such a profound extent that projects of ethnocentric purity are conceptually incoherent and practically impossible. Yet, as critics of modernity and globalization have shown, ideas and practices of identity, oneness, and totality without difference and remainder are themselves highly questionable. The ideal of the whole then needs to be one that encourages concurrently maximizing unity and diversity, complementarity and difference, such that each can be itself without being leveled in synthesis. In conclusion, in response to the overly Hegelian notion of unity as synthesis operational in Merleau-Ponty’s essay discussed above, we might ponder a poem about a leaf written for Marianne von Willemer in 1815 by the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.14 Goethe composed the poem “Gingo [gingko] biloba” published in West-östlicher Diwan (West-Eastern Divan) that expresses an idealized image of the unity of difference in love as well as the potentially complementary relationship between East and West as concurrently one and two.15 Gingo biloba Dieses Baums Blatt, der von Osten Meinem Garten anvertraut, Giebt geheimen Sinn zu kosten, Wie’s den Wissenden erbaut,

260 Chinese and Buddhist Philosophy in Early Twentieth-Century German Thought Ist es Ein lebendig Wesen, Das sich in sich selbst getrennt? Sind es zwei, die sich erlesen, Daß man sie als Eines kennt? Solche Frage zu erwidern, Fand ich wohl den rechten Sinn, Fühlst du nicht an meinen Liedern, Daß ich Eins und doppelt bin? This leaf from a tree in the East, Has been entrusted to my garden. It reveals a secret sense, Which pleases thoughtful people. Is it one living being, Which has divided itself? Or are these two, who chose To be known as one? Answering this sort of question, Haven’t I found the proper sense, Don’t you feel in my songs, That I’m one and double? Ѡ㺖䡔ᴣ㨝  㨫䗭。㨝ᄤⱘ‍᳼ˈ ⫳ ᕲᵅᮍ⿏䘆៥ⱘ೦ᒁ˗ ᅗ㌺Դϔ‫⾬ן‬ᆚଳ⼎ˈ 㗤ҎᇟੇˈҸ䄬㗙ᤃགDŽ  ᰃϔ‫ן‬᳝⫳ੑⱘ⠽储ˈ ᅗ ೼㞾Ꮕ储ܻϔߚ⚎Ѡ˛ 䙘ᰃܽ‫⫳ן‬ੑড়೼ϔ䍋ˈ 㹿៥‫ⳟץ‬៤њϔ储˛  䀅៥Ꮖᡒࠄℷ⺎ㄨḜˈ г ՚ಲㄨ䗭ῷϔ‫ן‬ଣ丠˖ Դ䲷䘧ϡᛳ㾎೼៥䀽Ёˈ 16 ៥᮶ᰃ៥ˈজᰃԴ੠៥˛ 

Notes Introduction 1

Translation from John Freely, Light from the East: How the Science of Medieval Islam Helped to Shape the Western World (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011), 49. 2 A. Charles Muller, Korea’s Great Buddhist-Confucian Debate: The Treatises of Chong Tojon (Sambong) and Hamho Tuktong (Kihwa) (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2015), 104. 3 Recent defenses of the Hegelian-Husserlian idea of Europe include Rodolphe Gasché, Europe, or the Infinite Task: A Study of a Philosophical Concept (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009); Philippe Nemo, What Is the West? (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2006). 4 “Word, Dialogue, and Novel” is published in Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 64–91; compare María Jesús Martínez Alfaro, “Intertextuality: Origins and Development of the Concept.” Atlantis 18.1/2 (1996): 268–285. Note that for Kristeva, “The notion of intertextuality replaces that of intersubjectivity” (Desire in Language, 66). This work will employ intertextual and intersubjective interpretive strategies and presupposes the validity of both. 5 Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue, and Novel,” 66. 6 For the nature and context of the Eastern adaptation of the word “philosophy,” see Carine Defoort, “Is ‘Chinese Philosophy’ a Proper Name? A Response to Rein Raud.” Philosophy East and West 4.56 (October 2006): 625–660; and Ady Van den Stock, The Horizon of Modernity: Subjectivity and Social Structure in New Confucian Philosophy (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 198. 7 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 128. 8 See, for instance, Eric S. Nelson, “Suffering, Evil, and the Emotions: A Joseon Debate between Neo-Confucianism and Buddhism.” 국제고려학 (International Journal of Korean Studies) 16 (2016): 447–462. 9 Georg W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes (Stuttgart: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2013), 52. 10 See Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity (London: Macmillan, 2005).

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11 Saul Bellow posed this anti-multicultural question, which he subsequently sought to distance himself from, see Mark Connelly, Saul Bellow: A Literary Companion (Jefferson: McFarland and Company, 2016), 191–192. 12 On the racial character of the factical history and project of modern European philosophy, see Peter K. J. Park, Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy: Racism in the Formation of the Philosophical Canon, 1780–1830 (Albany : State University of New York Press, 2013). 13 Martin Buber, Hasidism, ed. and trans. Maurice Friedman (New York: The Philosophical Library, 1948), 188. 14 Buber, Hasidism, 199–200.

Chapter 1 1

2

3

4

5 6 7 8

On Western “constructions” of Confucianism, see Lionel M. Jensen, Manufacturing Confucianism: Chinese Traditions & Universal Civilization (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). See the respective discussions in Franklin Perkins, Leibniz and China: A Commerce of Light (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); and Maurice Friedman, “Martin Buber and Asia.” Philosophy East and West 26.4 (1976): 411–426. On Nicolas Malebranche’s identification of Chinese thought with Spinoza, see Jonathan I. Israel, Enlightenment Contested Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670–1752 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 650–651. For a more sympathetic interpretation of Malebranche, see Gregory M. Reihman, “Malebranche and Chinese Philosophy: A Reconsideration.” British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 21.2 (2013): 262–280. Christian Wolff, Rede über die praktische Philosophie der Chinesen (Hamburg: Meiner, 1985). On Wolff ’s Pietist critics, see H.-M. Gerlach, Christian Wolff: seine Schule und seine Gegner (Hamburg: Meiner, 2001). On the context and reception of his speech, see Robert Louden, “‘What Does Heaven Say?’ Christian Wolff and Western Interpretations of Confucian Ethics,” in B. W. Van Norden (ed.), Confucius and the Analects: New Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 73–93. Herbert Fingarette, Confucius: The Secular as Sacred (Long Grove: Waveland Press, 1998). Matthew Tindal, Christianity as Old as the Creation: Or, the Gospel, a Republication of the Religion of Nature (London: [various], 1731), 342. Friedrich Schleiermacher, Kritische Gesamtausgabe: Briefwechsel 1803–1804 (Briefe 1541–1830), Part 5, Vol. 7 (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 2005), 121–122. Friedrich Schleiermacher, Kritische Gesamtausgabe: Briefwechsel, 1774–1796 (Briefe 1–326), Part 5, Vol. 1 (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 1986), 56.

Notes 9

10 11 12

13

14 15

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The European portrayal of Chinese despotism has its roots in the early Enlightenment and is perhaps best known today from the influential analysis of Karl A. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957). Building on the earlier accounts of Weber and Marx, Wittfogel’s theory of “Oriental despotism” is used to explain bureaucratic “hydraulic empires” that rely on the wide-scale management of water and land through irrigation and agriculture as well as autocratic manipulation of the masses. On the early development of the idea of Oriental despotism, in the context of Leibniz’s alternative approach to Chinese political culture, see Eric S. Nelson, “Leibniz and the Political Theology of the Chinese,” in Wenchao Li (ed.), Leibniz and the European Encounters with China: 300 Years of Discours sur la théologie naturelle des Chinois (Stuttgart: Studia Leibnitiana Sonderhefte, 2017). Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophie der Geschichte: In Achtzehn Vorlesungen Gehalten Zu Wien im Jahre 1828 (Vienna: Schaumburg, 1829), 95–96. Schlegel, Philosophie der Geschichte, 96. Concerning Montesquieu, see Madeleine Dobie, “Montesquieu’s Political Fictions: Oriental Despotism and the Representation of the Feminine.” Transactions of the Ninth International Congress on the Enlightenment, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 348 (1996): 1336–1339. On the European “feminization” of Chinese men, compare Nicolas Schillinger, The Body and Military Masculinity in Late Qing and Early Republican China: The Art of Governing Soldiers (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016), 2–4. A. L. Macfie describes how in European Orientalism: “the Orient (the East, the ‘other’) (a sort of surrogate, underground version of the West or the ‘self ’)” is interpreted as “irrational, aberrant, backward, crude, despotic, inferior, inauthentic, passive, feminine, and sexually corrupt.” A. L. Macfie, Orientalism (London: Pearson Education, 2002), 8. An early contrast between European freedom and “Oriental despotism” in German thought, which had earlier sources in Greek conceptions of the Persians and Montesquieu’s portrait of Muslim and Eastern empires, was made by Johann Georg Meusel in his 1776 work Der Geschichtforscher, Partes 3–4, 239. Christoph Meiners identified “Oriental despotism” as a racial characteristic of the “Mongoloid” people, of which the Chinese were a major representative, in Meiners, “Über die Ursachen des Despotismus.” Göttingisches Historisches Magazin 2 (1788): 193–229. Compare Park, Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy, 76-95. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 87. See the brief discussion of Kant and Daoism in Chapter 4 and my fuller account of Kant’s racial aesthetics and assessment of Daoism in Eric S. Nelson, “Kant and China: Aesthetics, Race, and Nature.” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 38.4 (December 2011): 509–525.

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Notes

16 Friedrich Ast, Grundriss einer Geschichte der Philosophie (Landshut: Thomann, 1807), 36–37. 17 Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 88. 18 Albrecht von Haller, Briefe über die wichtigsten Wahrheiten der Offenbarung (Reuttlingen: Fleischhauer, 1779), 149. 19 Max Weber, Die Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen: Konfuzianismus und Taoismus, Schriften 1915–1920, ed. Helwig Schmidt-Glinzer (Tubingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1989). Max Weber, The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism, trans. and ed. Hans H. Gerth (Glencoe: Free Press, 1951). Max Weber citations are to the pages of the MWG: Max Weber Gesamtausgabe (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1984) and RSI: Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1920–1921). 20 Weber, MWG I/19, 294–296; RSI, 402–403; MWG I/19, 332–334; RSI, 430–431. 21 Compare Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society (Boston: Beacon Press 1984), 434–435. 22 Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002), 319. 23 Weber, MWG I/19, 334–335; RSI, 431–433. 24 Weber, MWG I/19, 360–362; RSI, 452–454. 25 Compare Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Greek Philosophy to Plato (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 121. 26 Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. Barbara E. Galli (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 83. 27 Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, 83. Compare, however, Barbara Ellen Galli, Franz Rosenzweig and Jehuda Halevi (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995), 387. She concludes that Rosenzweig “had already a clearer picture than we do today of the intentions and meaning of authentic dialogue and of pluralism, and this I claim despite his grave shortcomings with regard to Confucianism, Islam, and the East Indian religions.” 28 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), 267; KSA 5, 220–221. 29 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), I. 24, 49; KSA 3, 399. 30 Weber, MWG I/19, 277–278; RSI, 389–390. 31 Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967), IV.4. KSA 6, 369. See Chapter 3 for more on this topic. 32 Naturalness of feeling is one element of a much more complex story, see the depictions offered in Zhaoming Qian (ed.), Erza Pound and China (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003). 33 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927–1934 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 801.

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34 On the background of this position, see Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), 166. 35 Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Sämmtliche Werke: Philosophie der Mythologie (Stuttgart and Augsburg: Cotta, 1857), 561. 36 Schelling, Philosophie der Mythologie, 561. A secularized messianic variation of this criticism can be found in Slavoj Žižek, Demanding the Impossible (Oxford: Polity, 2013), 11. 37 Schelling, Philosophie der Mythologie, 560. 38 Schelling, Philosophie der Mythologie, 561. 39 Josef Popper-Lynkeus, Das Recht zu leben und die Pflicht zu sterben. Sozialphilosophische Betrachtungen Anknüpfend an die Bedeutung Voltaires für die Neuere Zeit, 4th edition (Vienna: R. Löwit-Verlag, 1924), 3, 61, 112. 40 Josef Popper-Lynkeus, Das Ich und das soziale Gewissen (Dresden: Reissner, 1924), 78–80. 41 Josef Popper-Lynkeus, Die allgemeine Wehrpflicht als Losung der sozialen Frage: Mit einem Nachweis der theoretischen und praktischen Wertlosigkeit der Wirtschaftslehre (Dresden: Reissner, 1912), 31. 42 Josef Popper-Lynkeus, Selbstbiographie (Leipzig: Verlag Unesma, 1917), 50–51. 43 Josef Popper-Lynkeus, Über Religion: Im Auftrage des Verfassers aus seinem Literarischen Nachlasse, ed. Margit Ornstein (Vienna: R. Löwit, 1924), 81. 44 On his portrayal of the purity of Confucian ethics and the impurity of Christian ethics, see Josef Popper-Lynkeus, Das Individuum und die Bewertung menschlicher Existenzen (Dresden: Reissner, 1910), 74–78, 83, 114. 45 Otto Neurath, Economic Writings: Selections 1904–1945 (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2004), 458. 46 Otto Neurath, Empiricism and Sociology (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1973), 267. Much more needs to be said about the asymmetrical power relations that have shaped the East Asian reception of Western philosophy and the the Western reception of East Asian philosphy. On how the asymmetrical power relations have shaped the discourse of modern Buddhist philosophy in East Asia, see Jin Y. Park, “Philosophizing and Power: East-West Encounter in the Formation of Modern East Asian Buddhist Philosophy.” Philosophy East and West 67.3 (July 2017): 801–824. 47 For the images, see Wu Mi ਇᅧ (ed.), Xueheng ᅌ㸵 (Critical Review) 1.1 (1922): n.p.; on the Xueheng intellectuals, compare Sun Shangyang ᄿᇮ᦮ and Guo Lanfang 䛁㰁㢇, Guogu xinzhi lun: Xueheng pai wenhua lunzhu jiyao ೟ᬙᮄⶹ 䂪ũᅌ㸵⌒᭛࣪䂪㨫䔃㽕(Old Culture and New Knowledge: Contributions of the Xueheng-Group to Intellectual Discussion) (Beijing: Guangbo dianshi, 1995), 1–18. On the problematic of modernizing antiquity in Republican China, in a work concerning the Chinese poetic tradition, see Shengqing Wu, Modern Archaics: Continuity and Innovation in the Chinese Lyric Tradition, 1900–1937 (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2014), 356–379.

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48 Georg Misch, The Dawn of Philosophy: A Philosophical Primer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951). This edition is a substantially altered and revised English translation of Georg Misch, Der Weg in die Philosophie (Leipzig: Teubner, 1926). 49 Georg Misch, “Von den Gestaltungen der Persönlichkeit,” in Wilhelm Dilthey (ed.), Weltanschauung Philosophie und Religion in Darstellungen (Berlin: Reichl & Co, 1911), 95. 50 Weber, MWG I/19, 294–295; RSI, 402–403. 51 Wilhelm Dilthey, Gesammelte Schriften 10: System der Ethik (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1981), 97. 52 Misch, Der Weg in die Philosophie, 193. 53 Misch, The Dawn of Philosophy, 44. 54 Misch, The Dawn of Philosophy, 44, 172. 55 Karl Jaspers, Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus: The Paradigmatic Individuals (New York: Harcourt, 1962), 87, 89, 95. 56 Misch, The Dawn of Philosophy, 45. 57 Dilthey, System der Ethik, 97. 58 Bertrand Russell, The Problem of China (New York: The Century Company, 1922); Martin Buber, “China und wir,” in Nachlese (Heidelberg: Schneider, 1965), 205–212. Translation in Martin Buber, Pointing the Way: Collected Essays (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1990), 124–125. Helmuth Plessner, Gesammelte Schriften VI: Die verspätete Nation (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1982), 124. Buber’s title “China and Us” is a reference to the title of Eugen Moser, Konfuzius und wir (Zurich: Rotapfel Verlag, 1923). 59 Buber, “China und wir,” 205–212; Pointing the Way, 124–125. 60 Martin Buber, “Society and the State” (1951), published in English in Buber, Pointing the Way, 161–176. Also note Martin Buber, “Lao Tzu al hashilton.” Hapo’el Hatsa’ir 35 (1942): 6–8; this short piece is a Hebrew translation of passages from the Daodejing concerning government. The overly simplistic contrast between a spontaneous playful generation of immanence in Daoism and a repressive Confucian hierarchal ordering of immanence is repeated in a number of postmodern discussions concerning sexual energies: see Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Thousand Plateaus (London: Continuum, 2001), 157; Jean François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy (London: Continuum, 2004), 210; Julia Kristeva, Hatred and Forgiveness (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 52. 61 Martin Buber, Schriften zur Jugend, Erziehung und Bildung (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2005), 374, 383. Buber’s inconsistency regarding Daoism and Zen Buddhism, which he could celebrate as an emancipatory ethos and dismiss as mere mysticism, will be examined respectively in Chapters 4 and 7. 62 Martin Buber, The Letters of Martin Buber: A Life of Dialogue (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 275. Legge’s translation is: “He who offends against

Notes

63

64 65 66 67 68

69

70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79

267

Heaven has none to whom he can pray.” The Chinese text reads: “⥆㔾ᮐ໽ˈ⛵ ᠔⾅гDŽ” Analects, 3:13. Martin Buber, Eclipse of God: Studies in the Relation Between Religion and Philosophy (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), 37; Martin Buber, Werke, Band 1: Schriften zur Philosophie (Munich and Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider Verlag, 1962), 530. Buber, Eclipse of God, 37; Schriften zur Philosophie, 530. Buber, Eclipse of God, 37; Schriften zur Philosophie, 530. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics: The Doctrine of Creation, Vol. 3, Pt. 2: The Creature (Edinburgh: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2004), 277. Martin Buber, Between Man and Man (London: Routledge Classics, 2002), 264. Jaspers,s letter to Arendt, September 24, 1957; Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Hannah Arendt/Karl Jaspers Briefwechsel, 1926–1969 (München: Piper, 1985), 361. Also compare Jaspers remark against the “banal” image of Confucius in Sinology Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, 57. Translation modified from Jaspers, Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, 49. On the priority of communication in Jaspers, see Eric S. Nelson, “Faith and Knowledge: Karl Jaspers on Communication and the Encompassing.” Existentia 13.3–4 (2003): 207–218. Jaspers, Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, 50. Jaspers, Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, 96. Jaspers, Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, 48, 56–57. Jaspers, Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, 48. Jaspers, Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, 43, 92–93. Jaspers, Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, 62. Jaspers, Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, 57. Jaspers, Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, 57. Karl Jaspers, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Plotinus, Lao-Tzu, Nagarjuna, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966). On the portability of Confucianism in the Western world, see Robert C. Neville, Boston Confucianism: Portable Tradition in the Late-Modern World (Albany : State University of New York Press, 2000).

Chapter 2 1

Wei Zhang elucidates Hu Shi’s modern Enlightenment-oriented appropriation of Confucianism in What Is Enlightenment: Can China Answer Kant’s Question? (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010); also compare, on his debt to John Dewey’s pragmatism and scientism, Martina Eglauer, Wissenschaft als Chance: das Wissenschaftsverständnis des chinesischen Philosophen Hu Shi (1891–1962) unter

268

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3 4 5

6

7

8 9 10

11 12 13

14

Notes dem Einfluss von John Deweys (1859–1952) Pragmatismus (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2001). Sun Yat-Sen, Sanmin zhuyi ϝ⇥Џ㕽 (The Three Principles of the People). Originally published in 1924. Reprinted in Sanmin zhuyi (The Three Principles of the People), 18th ed. (Taipei: Sanmin Press, 1996). This interpretation of Sun’s anticosmopolitanism is developed in Eric S. Nelson, “Fei duichen lunlixue yu shijie gongmin zhuyi kuanrong beilun” 䴲ᇡ々‫⧚׿‬ᅌ㟛Ϫ⬠݀⇥Џ㕽ᇀᆍᙪ䂪. Jilin Daxue shehui kexue xuebao ঢ়ᵫ໻ᅌ⼒᳗⾥ᅌᅌฅ (Jilin University Journal Social Sciences Edition) 3 (2014): 101–107. Rudolf Eucken and Carsun Chang, Das Lebensproblem in China und Europa (Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1922). Eucken and Chang, Das Lebensproblem in China und Europa, 95; Analects, 15:29: “ᄤ᳄: Ҏ㛑ᓬ䘧ǃ䴲䘧ᓬҎ” On Liang Qichao’s intellectual project, compare Xiaobing Tang, Global Space and the Nationalist Discourse of Modernity: The Historical Thinking of Liang Qichao (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). Rudolf Eucken, Lebenserinnerungen: Ein Stück Deutschen Lebens (Leipzig: K.F. Koehler, 1921), 113–114; Rudolf Eucken, His Life, Work and Travels (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1921), 204–205; Hans Driesch and Margarete Driesch, FernOst als gäste Jungchinas (Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus, 1925), 223; Ming-huei Lee, Konfuzianischer Humanismus: Transkulturelle Kontexte (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2013), 58. On Zhang’s initial encounter and impression of Eucken, see Zhang Junmai, “Xueshu fangfa shang zhi guanjian” ᅌ㸧ᮍ⊩ϞПㅵ㽟 (My Humble Understanding of Scholarly Methods). Gaizao ᬍ䗴 (Reconstruction) 4.5 (1922): 1–9, and see p. 3. Eucken, Lebenserinnerungen, 173–178; Eucken, His Life, Work and Travels, 93–97. Eucken, Lebenserinnerungen, 173; Eucken, His Life, Work and Travels, 93–94. On Eucken’s interest in intellectual exchange with Asia and in Buddhism, see Eucken, Lebenserinnerungen, 176–177; Eucken, His Life, Work and Travels, 96–97; Rudolf Eucken, Der Deutsche Genius (Munich: Verlag Hanns Fruth, 1924), 60; Rudolf Eucken, Grundlinien einer Neuen Lebensanschauung (Leipzig: Verlag von Veit & Comp., 1907), 6; and Rudolf Eucken, Der Wahrheitsgehalt der Religion (Leipzig: Verlag von Veit und Comp., 1901), 9. Eucken, Lebenserinnerungen, 195–196; Eucken, His Life, Work and Travels, 108. Eucken, Lebenserinnerungen, 195–196; Eucken, His Life, Work and Travels, 108. See, for instance, the epilogue in Eucken and Chang, Das Lebensproblem in China und Europa, 198–200. On Eucken’s debt to Fichte, see Hans Friedrich Fulda, “Neufichteanismus in Rudolf Euckens Philosophie des Geisteslebens?” FichteStudien 35 (2010): 107–150. Eucken, Lebenserinnerungen, 208–209; Eucken, His Life, Work and Travels, 116–117.

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15 Max Horkheimer, “Rudolf Eucken. Ein Epigone des Idealismus” (1926), in Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 2 (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1987), 154–157. 16 Lee, Konfuzianischer Humanismus, 58; Zhang described his relationship with and interpretation of Eucken in Zhang Junmai, “Woyikeng jingshen shenghuo zhexue dagai” ‫؁‬Ӟ䦫㊒⼲⫳⌏૆ᅌ໻ὖ (An Outline of Eucken’s Philosophy of Spiritual Life). Gaizao 3.7 (1921): 1–18; and his initial encounter and impression of Eucken in Zhang, “My Humble Understanding of Scholarly Methods,” 3. Also note Zhang’s impressions of Bergson in Zhang Junmai, “Faguo zhexue jia Bogesen tanhua ji” ⊩ ೟૆ᅌᆊᶣḐỂ䂛䁅㿬 (French Philosopher Bergson in Conversation). Gaizao 3.12 (1921): 7–11. 17 Eucken, Lebenserinnerungen, 113–114; Eucken, His Life, Work and Travels, 204–205. 18 Eucken and Chang, Das Lebensproblem in China und Europa, iii–v. 19 Eucken and Chang, Das Lebensproblem in China und Europa, iii–v. 20 Eucken and Chang, Das Lebensproblem in China und Europa, 198–200. 21 Eucken and Chang, Das Lebensproblem in China und Europa, 124; also note 30. 22 Eucken and Chang, Das Lebensproblem in China und Europa, 3, 10. 23 Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 119–139. 24 Zhang, “An Outline of Eucken’s Philosophy”, 1–8, and see p. 1; it is also included in Zhang Junmai, Zhong Xi Yin zhexue wenji Ё㽓ॄ૆ᅌ᭛䲚, Vol. 2, ed. Cheng Wenxi ⿟᭛❭(Taipei: Xuesheng shuju, 1981), 1095–1115. 25 Zhang, “An Outline of Eucken’s Philosophy,” 1. 26 Zhang, “An Outline of Eucken’s Philosophy,” 1–2. 27 Zhang, “An Outline of Eucken’s Philosophy,” 2. 28 Zhang, “An Outline of Eucken’s Philosophy,” 3. 29 Zhang, “An Outline of Eucken’s Philosophy,” 4–5. 30 Zhang, “An Outline of Eucken’s Philosophy,” 7; Rudolf Eucken, Der Sinn und Wert des Lebens (Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1907). 31 Zhang, “An Outline of Eucken’s Philosophy,” 7. 32 Zhang, “An Outline of Eucken’s Philosophy,” 9. 33 Eucken’s Letter to Zhang, translated as “Woyikeng shi fu Zhang Junmai shu” ‫؁‬Ӟ 䦫⇣㽚ᔉ৯ࣅ᳌. Gaizao 3.6 (1921): 109–110. 34 Eucken’s Letter to Zhang, 109–110. 35 “Ouzhou wenhua zhi weiji ji Zhongguo xin wenhua zhi quxiang” ℤ⌆᭛࣪Пॅ″ ঞЁ೟ᮄ᭛࣪П䍼৥ (The Crisis of European Culture and the Tendency of New Culture in China). Dongfang zazhi ᵅᮍ䲰䁠 (The Eastern Miscellany) 13.3 (1922): 117–123. 36 Compare the analysis of this point in Vera Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1986); Wei Zhang, What Is Enlightenment? and, also

270

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38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

48 49 50 51 52

53

Notes compare, Edmund S. K. Fung, The Intellectual Foundations of Chinese Modernity: Cultural and Political Thought in the Republican Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Driesch and Driesch, Fern-Ost als gäste Jungchinas, 11; note his posthumously published autobiography, Hans Driesch, Lebenserinnerungen: Aufzeichnungen eines Forschers und Denkers in Entscheidender Zeit (Basel: E. Reinhardt, 1951), 167. Zhang’s article “Report on German Philosopher Driesch Coming to the East and Synopsis of His Scholarship” clarifies the purpose of Driesch’s visit to China and pertinence for a Chinese audience: “Deguo zhexue jia Dulishu shi dong lai zhi baogao ji qi xueshuo dalue” ᖋ೟૆ᅌᆊᴰ䞠㟦⇣ᵅ՚Пฅਞঞ݊ᅌ䁾໻⬹. Gaizao 4.6 (1921): 1–24; see also Zhang, Zhong Xi Yin zhexue wenji, 1124–1149. Zhang, “Report on German Philosopher Driesch Coming to the East and Synopsis of His Scholarship,” 12–13. Compare Driesch and Driesch, Fern-Ost als gäste Jungchinas, 223. Driesch and Driesch, Fern-Ost als gäste Jungchinas, 224. Driesch and Driesch, Fern-Ost als gäste Jungchinas, 224. Driesch and Driesch, Fern-Ost als gäste Jungchinas, 224–226. Driesch and Driesch, Fern-Ost als gäste Jungchinas, 226. Driesch and Driesch, Fern-Ost als gäste Jungchinas, 16. Driesch and Driesch, Fern-Ost als gäste Jungchinas, 13; Hans Driesch, Grundprobleme der Psychologie: Ihre Krisis in der Gegenwart (Leipzig: E. Reinicke, 1926), iii. Hans Driesch, Relativitätstheorie und Philosophie (Karlsruhe: G. Braun, 1924), 1. Hans Driesch, Aiyinsitan shi xiangduilun ji qi piping ᛯ಴ᮃഺ⇣Ⳍᇡ䂪ঞ݊ᡍ䀩 (Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and Its Criticism), trans. Zhang Junmai (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1924); see Danian Hu, China and Albert Einstein: The Reception of the Physicist and His Theory in China, 1917–1979 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 138. Driesch and Driesch, Fern-Ost als gäste Jungchinas, 5. Driesch and Driesch, Fern-Ost als gäste Jungchinas, 5; Hermann Keyserling, Das Reisetagebuch Eines Philosophen, 2 Vols (Darmstadt: O. Reichl, 1919). Driesch and Driesch, Fern-Ost als gäste Jungchinas, 5. Margarete Driesch, Frauen Jenseits Der Ozeane: Unter Mitwirkung Fürhrender Zeitgenossen Aus Jenen Ländern (Heidelberg: N. Kampmann, 1928). Anne Harrington, Reenchanted Science: Holism in German Culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 190–193. Democracy is the highest political form according to Driesch, Die Sittliche Tat (Leipzig: Reinicke, 1927), 151. Harrington, Reenchanted Science, 193; compare Driesch, Lebenserinnerungen, 239, 271–274. It is also interesting to note one of his outlets for publishing about parapsychology was another German-Jewish publication Der Morgen: Monatsschrift

Notes

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55

56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67

68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79

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der Juden in Deutschland (Morning: Monthly of the Jews in Germany) published from 1925 to 1938. See Frank Dikötter, The Construction of Racial Identities in China and Japan: History and Contemporary Perspectives (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997). 22. Zhang Junmai, Minzu fuxing zhi xueshu jichu ⇥ᮣᕽ㟜Пᅌ㸧෎⻢ (The Scientific Foundations for National Revival) (Beijing: Zaishengshe, 1935), 10, 22, 34; Zhang Junmai, Mingri zhi Zhongguo wenhua ᯢ᮹ПЁ೟᭛࣪ (The Chinese Culture of Tomorrow) (Beijing: Zhongguo renmin daxue chubanshe, 1936). Harrington, Reenchanted Science, 190. Driesch and Driesch, Fern-Ost als gäste Jungchinas, 6. Driesch and Driesch, Fern-Ost als gäste Jungchinas, 20–21, 30–31. Driesch and Driesch, Fern-Ost als gäste Jungchinas, 20–21. Driesch and Driesch, Fern-Ost als gäste Jungchinas, 20–21. On the history of the idea of “yellow peril,” see John K. W. Tchen and Dylan Yeats (eds.), Yellow Peril!: An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear (London: Verso, 2014). Hermann von Samson-Himmelstjerna, Die Gelbe Gefahr als Moralproblem (Berlin: Deutscher Kolonial-Verlag, 1902). Christian von Ehrenfels, Sexualethik (Wiesbaden: J.F. Bergmann, 1907), 88; Christian von Ehrenfels, “Die gelbe Gefahr.” Sexual-Probleme 4 (1908): 185–205. Emmanuel Levinas, Unforeseen History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 108. Richard Wilhelm, Die Seele Chinas (Berlin: R. Hobbing, 1926). Translation: Richard Wilhelm, The Soul of China (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1928). Driesch and Driesch, Fern-Ost als gäste Jungchinas, 20–21, 39. David J. Wertheim, Salvation Through Spinoza: A Study of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 34; Hans Driesch, “Können Rassen einander Verstehen?” (Can Races Understand Each Other?). C. V. Zeitung iv.41 (1925): 669–671. Wertheim, Salvation Through Spinoza, 34. Driesch, “Können Rassen einander Verstehen?,” 669. Driesch, “Können Rassen einander Verstehen?,” 670–671. Driesch, “Können Rassen einander Verstehen?,” 670. Driesch and Driesch, Fern-Ost als gäste Jungchinas, 30. Driesch and Driesch, Fern-Ost als gäste Jungchinas, 32–33. Driesch and Driesch, Fern-Ost als gäste Jungchinas, 35, 39. Driesch and Driesch, Fern-Ost als gäste Jungchinas, 36. Driesch and Driesch, Fern-Ost als gäste Jungchinas, 37–38, 162. Driesch and Driesch, Fern-Ost als gäste Jungchinas, 301–307. Driesch and Driesch, Fern-Ost als gäste Jungchinas, 301–302. Driesch and Driesch, Fern-Ost als gäste Jungchinas, 302.

272 80 81 82 83 84 85

Notes

Driesch and Driesch, Fern-Ost als gäste Jungchinas, 302. Driesch and Driesch, Fern-Ost als gäste Jungchinas, 303. Driesch and Driesch, Fern-Ost als gäste Jungchinas, 304. Driesch and Driesch, Fern-Ost als gäste Jungchinas, 304. Driesch and Driesch, Fern-Ost als gäste Jungchinas, 305. Driesch and Driesch, Fern-Ost als gäste Jungchinas, 305; Driesch, Die Sittliche Tat, 146. 86 Driesch and Driesch, Fern-Ost als gäste Jungchinas, 306. 87 Driesch and Driesch, Fern-Ost als gäste Jungchinas, 306–307. 88 Driesch and Driesch, Fern-Ost als gäste Jungchinas, 307. 89 Driesch and Driesch, Fern-Ost als gäste Jungchinas, 307; Driesch, Die Sittliche Tat, 151. 90 Compare Michael Lackner, “Richard Wilhelm, a ‘Sinicized’ German Translator,” in Alleton, Vivianne and Michael Lackner (eds.), De l’un au multiple: traductions du chinois vers les langues européennes (Paris: Les Editions de la MSH, 1999), 86–97, particularly 91, 93; and Ursula Richter, “Richard Wilhelm: Founder of a Friendly China Image in Twentieth Century Germany.” Bulletin of the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica 20 (1991): 173–174. 91 Lackner, “Richard Wilhelm,” 91. 92 See Jay Goulding, “The Forgotten Frankfurt School: Richard Wilhelm’s China Institute.” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 41.1–2 (2014): 170–186. 93 Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion: West and East, trans. R.F.C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 5–6; Wilhelm, Die Seele Chinas; Wilhelm, The Soul of China. 94 Theodor Lessing, Untergang der Erde am Geist (Europa und Asien), 3rd ed. (Hanover: Adam, 1924); Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hermeneutik: Wahrheit und Methode. Ergänzungen (Tübingen: Mohr, 1985), 480. 95 Driesch and Driesch, Fern-Ost als gäste Jungchinas, 5; Keyserling, Das Reisetagebuch eines Philosophen, 2 Vols (Darmstadt: O. Reichl, 1919). 96 Keyserling, Das Reisetagebuch eines Philosophen, Vol. 2, 812–813. The modern problematic of technology and its devastation informs the interpretation of LaoZhuang Daoism in Keyserling, Wilhelm, and (see Chapter 4) Buber and Heidegger. 97 Keyserling, Das Reisetagebuch eines Philosophen, Vol. 2, 812–813. 98 See Hugo Dyserinck, Graf Hermann Keyserling und Frankreich: Ein Kapitel Deutsch-Französischer Geistesbeziehungen im 20. Jahrhundert (Bonn: H. Bouvier, 1970), 8; Frank-Lothar Kroll, Deutsche Autoren des Ostens als Gegner und Opfer des Nationalsozialismus: Beiträge zur Widerstandsproblematik (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2000), 51. 99 Kroll, Deutsche Autoren des Ostens als Gegner und Opfer des Nationalsozialismus, 51. 100 Eugen Herrigel, Zen in der Kunst des Bogenschiessens (Konstanz: C. Weller, 1948).

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101 On the context of and for an overview in English of the debate between Zhang and Ding, see Xiaoqun Xu, Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and Individualism in Modern China: The Chenbao Fukan and the New Cultural Era, 1918–1928 (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014), 198–207. Ding was a primary advocate of science and Westernization in the Republican era, on his life and thought, see Charlotte Furth, Ting Wen-chiang: Science and China’s New Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970). 102 Xu, Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and Individualism, 198–202; Driesch and Driesch, Fern-Ost als gäste Jungchinas, 225. 103 Compare Timothy Cheek, The Intellectual in Modern Chinese History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 83. 104 Compare Cheek, The Intellectual in Modern Chinese History, 83. 105 Eucken and Chang, Das Lebensproblem in China und Europa, 198–200. On the problem of Enlightenment in China and the May Fourth Movement, see Zhang, What Is Enlightenment? and Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment. 106 On Zhang’s political thought and practice, see Roger B. Jeans, Jr., Democracy and Socialism in Republican China: The Politics of Zhang Junmai (Carsun Chang), 1906– 1941 (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997); Zhang Junmai, The Third Force in China (New York: Bookman Associates, 1952); Zhang Junmai, China and Gandhian India (New York: Bookman Associates, 1956). 107 Carsun Chang, The Development of Neo-Confucian Thought (New York: Bookman Associates, 1957) and Carsun Chang, Wang Yang-Ming: Idealist Philosopher of Sixteenth-Century China (New York: St. John’s University Press, 1962). 108 Chang, The Development of Neo-Confucian Thought; and Chang, Wang Yang-Ming. 109 Zhang Junmai, “Wo zhi zhexue sixiang” ៥П૆ᅌᗱᛇ (My Philosophical Thoughts). Zhong Xi Yin zhexue wenji 1, 37–62. It was originally published in the journal Zaisheng ‫ ⫳ݡ‬4.17 (July 15, 1953). 110 Zhang, “My Philosophical Thoughts,” 38. 111 Eucken and Chang, Das Lebensproblem in China und Europa, 187–188. 112 Compare Minghui Li ᴢᯢ䓱, Kangde zhexue zai xiandai Zhongguo ᒋᖋ૆ᅌ೼⧒ ҷЁ೟(Kant’s Philosophy in Modern China), in Li, Kangde zhexue zai Dongya ᒋ ᖋ૆ᅌ೼ᵅѲ (Kant’s Philosophy in East Asia) (Taipei: guoli Taiwan daxue chuban zhongxin, 2016), 5. 113 Zhang, “My Philosophical Thoughts,” 44. 114 Zhang, “My Philosophical Thoughts,” 44. 115 Zhang, “My Philosophical Thoughts,” 44. 116 Zhang, “My Philosophical Thoughts,” 44. 117 Zhang, “My Philosophical Thoughts,” 44–45. 118 Zhang, “My Philosophical Thoughts,” 44. 119 Zhang, “My Philosophical Thoughts,” 51. 120 Zhang, “My Philosophical Thoughts,” 59.

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121 Zhang, “My Philosophical Thoughts,” 59. 122 Zhang, “My Philosophical Thoughts,” 59. 123 [Zhang Junmai] Carsun Chang, The Development of Neo-Confucian Thought: Vol. 1 (London: Vision, 1958), 15. 124 Mou Zongsan, Wushi zishu Ѩक㞾䗄 (Autobiography at Fifty). (Taibei: Penghu chuban she, 1989). 125 Mou worked with Zhang’s social democratic political organization and advocated a form of Confucian democracy in his works. On Mou’s conception of democracy, see David Elstein, “Mou Zongsan’s New Confucian Democracy.” Contemporary Political Theory 11.2 (2012): 192–210. 126 Zhang Junmai, Tang Junyi, Mou Zongsan, and Xu Fuguan, “A Manifesto for a Re-Appraisal of Sinology and Reconstruction of Chinese Culture,” in Carsun Chang, The Development of Neo-Confucian Thought, Vol. 2 (New York: Bookman Associates, 1962); compare Jiyuan Yu, “ The ‘Manifesto’ of NewConfucianism and the Revival of Virtue Ethics.” Frontiers of Philosophy in China 3.3 (2008): 317–334; on the later construction of new Confucianism, compare John Makeham, “ The Retrospective Creation of New Confucianism,” in John Makeham (ed.), New Confucianism: A Critical Examination (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 25–53. 127 We have already explored the problematic of Chinese modernity and the importance of Kant in Zhang above; on Mou’s response to issues of Chinese modernity, see Roger T. Ames, “New Confucianism: A Native Response to Western Philosophy,” in Hua Shiping (ed.), Chinese Political Culture 1989–2000 (New York: East Gate, 2001), 70–99; Stephan Schmidt, “Mou Zongsan, Hegel, and Kant: The Quest for Confucian Modernity.” Philosophy East and West 61.2 (2011): 260–302; and Sébastien Billioud, Thinking Through Confucian Modernity: A Study of Mou Zongsan’s Moral Metaphysics (Leiden: Brill, 2011). 128 On the problem of intellectual intuition in Kant and Mou, see Nicholas Bunnin, “God’s Knowledge and Ours: Kant and Mou Zongsan on Intellectual Intuition.” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 35.4 (2008): 613–624. 129 Compare, in Mou’s case, Weimin Shi, “Mou Zongsan on Confucian Autonomy and Subjectivity: From Transcendental Philosophy to Transcendent Metaphysics.” Dao 14.2 (2015): 275–287. 130 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 2005), 53. On the early Chinese adaptation of Marxism, see Nick Knight, Marxist Philosophy in China: From Qu Qiubai to Mao Zedong, 1923–1945 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006).

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Chapter 3 1

2

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

14

References to the German edition of Nietzsche’s works are to: (KSA) Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: dtv, 1980). The following translations of the Analects are used in this chapter: Roger Ames and Henry Rosemont, Jr. (New York: Random House, 1998); Raymond Dawson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Charles Muller (http://www.acmuller.net/con-dao/analects.html); and Edward Slingerland (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003). Chinese text quotations are from the Chinese Text Project: http://ctext.org/. P. F. Strawson, “Freedom and Resentment,” in Strawson, Freedom and Resentment (London: Methuen & Co., 1974), 10. Compare Owen Flanagan, The Problem of the Soul: Two Visions of Mind and How to Reconcile Them (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 305. In addition to the interpersonal character of resentment described by Strawson, Flanagan stresses how negative emotions can be self-applied, although there is nothing in Strawson’s argument concerning the social character of resentment that entails that it cannot be self-applied. The interpersonal and the personal are two aspects of the same process. Negative emotions cannot function without the “self-regarding” first-person attitude according to Strawson; they are accordingly formed through our own personal application of other-oriented attitudes and social norms to ourselves. Strawson, “Freedom and Resentment,” 14–15. Strawson, “Freedom and Resentment,” 24–25. Strawson, “Freedom and Resentment,” 9. Max Scheler, Ressentiment (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1994), 48. Scheler, Ressentiment, 72–73. Max Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, trans. Peter Heath (Hamden: Archon Books, 1970), 100. Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, 100. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), I.1. KSA 5, 257. Compare Chiu-yee Cheung, Lu Xun, The Chinese “gentle” Nietzsche (Frankfurt: Lang, 2001), 45. Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, I.10. KSA 5, 270. The alterity and asymmetry in Confucian ethics is examined from a different perspective in Eric S. Nelson, “Levinas and Early Confucian Ethics: Religion, Rituality, and the Sources of Morality,” in Jeffrey Bloechl (ed.), Levinas Studies, Vol. 4 (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2009), 177–207. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), vii, 5. Nietzsche, KSA 6, 102.

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15 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 129. KSA 11, 570. 16 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, I. 24, 49. KSA 3, 399. 17 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 267. KSA 5, 220–221. 18 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, I. 24, 49. KSA 3, 399. 19 Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, IV.4. KSA 6, 369. 20 Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, I.16. KSA 5, 286. 21 See Eric S. Nelson, “Priestly Power and Damaged Life in Nietzsche and Adorno,” in Andreas Urs Sommer (ed.), Nietzsche, Philosoph der Kultur(en)?/Philosopher of Culture? (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), 349–356. 22 Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, 76. 23 Max Scheler, Person and Self-Value: Three Essays (Dordrecht: Springer, 1987), 153. 24 There is a rich and varied literature concerning Lu Xun, Nietzsche, and ressentiment; for example, see Cheung, Lu Xun, The Chinese “gentle” Nietzsche, 59; Kirk A. Denton, The Problematic of Self in Modern Chinese Literature: Hu Feng and Lu Ling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 58; Peter Button, Configurations of the Real in Chinese Literary and Aesthetic Modernity (Leiden: Brill Press, 2009), 98–99; and Wei Shao-hua, “A Wonderful show of ‘Resentment’: A New Interpretation of The True Story of Ah Q.” Oriental Forum 4 (2013): 76–79. On the problematic of ressentiment and modern Confucian intellectuals’ resentment over the fate of Confucian China, also compare: Jason Clower, “Chinese Ressentiment and Why New Confucians Stopped Caring about Yogācāra,” in John Makeham (ed.), Transforming Consciousness: The Intellectual Reception of Yogācāra Thought in Modern China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 25 Analects, 12:2. Also see Nelson, “Levinas and Early Confucian Ethics,” 177–207. 26 Analects, 1:1. 27 Analects, 1:16. 28 Mencius 4B28: 7. Mengzi: with Selections from Traditional Commentaries, trans. Bryan W. Van Norden (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2008), 112. 29 Analects, 8:7. 30 On the debate in critical social theory over the merits of a Marxian model of distribution or a Hegelian dialectic of recognition, see Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition?: A Political-Philosophical Exchange (London: Verso, 2003). 31 Also note the discussion of this passage in James Behuniak, Mencius on Becoming Human (Albany : State University of New York Press, 2005), 65. 32 Analects, 2:14; 4:10. 33 Analects, 6:30.

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34 Owen Flanagan, “Destructive Emotions.” Consciousness and Emotions 1.2 (2000): 277; also compare Chapter 6 of Owen Flanagan, The Geography of Morals: Varieties of Moral Possibility (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 113–126. 35 Also note the discussion of resentment (Sanskrit: dvesha, Pali: dosa, often translated as “aversion”) in the context of the Buddhist account of mental afflictions or negative emotions (Sanskrit: klesha, Pali: kilesa) in Owen Flanagan, The Bodhisattva’s Brain: Buddhism Naturalized (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011), 21, 105. 36 See, respectively, Analects, 4:18 and 5:23, 7:15. 37 See Irene Bloom’s discussion of the ambivalence of this term in Mencius, trans. Irene Bloom (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 97; also compare the careful elucidation of yuan in Michael D.K. Ing, “Born of Resentment: Yuan ᗼ in Early Confucian Thought.” Dao 15.1 (2016): 19–33. 38 Shixing deli wei zhi de, fan de wei yuan ᮑ㸠ᕫ⧚䃖Пᖋ, ডᖋ⠆ᗼ; Xingguo Wang, Jia Yi pingzhuan 䊜䂐䀩‫( ڇ‬Nanjing: Nanjing da xue chu ban she, 1992), 228. 39 Compare Hongkyung Kim, The Old Master: A Syncretic Reading of the Laozi from the Mawangdui Text A Onward (Albany : State University of New York Press, 2012), 103. 40 F. T. Cheng, China molded by Confucius: The Chinese Way in Western Light (London: Stevens and Sons, 1946), 81. 41 See particularly sections 7 and 10, Ta Hsüeh and Chung Yung: The Highest Order of Cultivation and on the Practice of the Mean, trans. Andrew Plaks (London: Penguin, 2003), 11, 17–18. 42 Analects, 4:14. 43 Analects, 14:10. 44 Note the discussion of economic status and the ability to overcome resentment in achieving a good disposition in Erin M. Cline, Confucius, Rawls, and the Sense of Justice (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 148. 45 See Mozi, Exalting Unity II, 12: 1 and Universal Love II, 15: 2. Mozi, The Mozi: A Complete Translation, trans. Ian Johnston (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2010), 99, 139. 46 See Mozi, Exalting Worthiness I, 8: 5. Mozi, The Mozi, 59. On the use of this distinction in Maoism and Confucianism, see Chun-Chieh Huang, “East Asian Conceptions of the Public and Private Realms,” in Kam-por Yu, Julia Tao, and Philip J. Ivanhoe (eds.), Taking Confucian Ethics Seriously: Contemporary Theories and Applications (Albany : State University of New York Press, 2010), 78. 47 Xiaojing, Ch. 4; The Chinese Classic of Family Reverence: A Philosophical Translation of the Xiaojing, trans. Henry Rosemont and Roger T. Ames (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009), 107. 48 Compare Paul R. Goldin, Confucianism (Durham: Acumen, 2011), 35.

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49 Compare Max Scheler, Philosophical Perspectives (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), 115–116; and Manfred S. Frings, Max Scheler (1874–1928) Centennial Essays (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 1974), 137. 50 Max Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and non-formal Ethics of Values (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1985), 231. 51 On Eucken’s decreasing yet lingering influence on Scheler’s intellectual development, compare Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction (Hague: Nijhoff, 1971), 235. 52 Xu Gan, Balanced Discourses: A Bilingual Edition, trans. John Makeham (Beijing and New Haven: Foreign Language Press and Yale University Press, 2002), 7. 53 Xiaojing, Ch. 1; 105. 54 Analects, 17:8. 55 Analects, 5:25. 56 James S. Hans, Contextual Authority and Aesthetic Truth (Albany : State University of New York Press, 1992), 337. 57 Hans, Contextual Authority and Aesthetic Truth, 337. 58 See, for instance, Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), sections 376 and 587. 59 Philip J. Ivanhoe, Readings from the Lu-Wang School of Neo-Confucianism (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2009), 176. 60 Mozi, On Being Sympathetic towards Officers, 1: 3. Mozi, The Mozi, 5. 61 Xunzi, 4.5; Xunzi, Xunzi: A Translation and Study of the Complete Works, Vol. 1, trans. John Knoblock (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 188. 62 On not resenting heaven as part of an ethical-epistemic project of recognizing and knowing, see Xinzhong Yao, Wisdom in Early Confucian and Israelite Traditions (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 203. 63 On the affinities (evident in Levinas’s Jewish writings) and tensions (visible in his philosophical writings) between immanence and transcendence in Confucian and Levinasian ethics, see Nelson, “Levinas and Early Confucian Ethics,” 177–207. 64 Analects 16:2. 65 Flanagan, “Destructive Emotions,” 269. 66 Mozi, On Being Sympathetic towards Officers, 1: 5. Mozi, The Mozi, 7. 67 Max Scheler, On the Eternal in Man (London: SCM Press, 1960), 430. 68 Daniel A. Bell, China’s New Confucianism: Politics and Everyday Life in a Changing Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 101.

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Chapter 4 1

For a critical assessment of the affinities and differences between Buber and Heidegger, see Haim Gordon, The Heidegger-Buber Controversy: The Status of the I-Thou (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001). There is little literature devoted to Buber’s philosophy of technology in contrast with the extensive reception of Heidegger’s thinking of technology. On the latter, significant works include: Michael E. Zimmerman, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity—Technology, Politics, Art (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); Iain D. Thomson, Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of Education (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); and, more skeptically, Don Ihde, Heidegger’s Technologies: Postphenomenological Perspectives (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010). The topic of Heidegger, Daoism, and technology has also been examined in Paul Shih-yi Hsiao, “Laotse und die Technik.” Die Katholischen Missionen 75 (1956): 72–74; and Graham Parkes, “Lao-Zhuang and Heidegger on Nature and Technology.” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 29.3 (2003): 19–38. 2 Kant 2: 252. All references to Kant’s works are to the Akademie edition, unless otherwise noted, cited by volume and page: Immanuel Kant, Kants Gesammelte Schriften, edited under the Königliche Preussische Akademie der Wissenshaften (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1902–1997). 3 Kant, 28: 1052. 4 Kant, 8: 335. 5 Jaspers, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Plotinus, Lao-Tzu, Nagarjuna trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966). 6 J. F. Zuckert (ed.), Sammlung der besten und neuesten Reisebeschreibungen in einem ausführlichen Auszuge, worinnen eine genaue Nachricht von der Religion, Regierungsverfassung, Handlung, Sitten, natürlichen Geschichte und andern merkwürdigen Dingen verschiedener Länder und Völker gegeben wird, Vol. 7 (Berlin: August Mylius, 1769), 103. 7 Karl Hammerdörfer, Allgemeine Weltgeschichte von den ältesten bis auf die neuesten Zeiten: Ein Lesebuch, auch für Nichtgelehrte (Halle: Buchhandlung des Waisenhauses, 1789), 100. 8 Schelling, Sämmtliche Werke, Philosophie der Mythologie, Vol. 12, 564. Compare Werner Lühmann, Konfuzius—Aufgeklärter Philosoph oder Reaktionärer Moralapostel? Der Bruch in der Konfuzius-Rezeption der Deutschen Philosophie des Ausgehenden 18. und Beginnenden 19. Jahrhunderts (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2003), 137. 9 Schelling, Philosophie der Mythologie, 564. 10 Schelling, Philosophie der Mythologie, 564. 11 Compare Gustav A. C. Frantz, Schelling’s Positive Philosophie, nach ihrem Inhalt, wie nach ihrer Bedeutung für den allgemeinen Umschwung der bis jetzt noch herrschenden Denkweise (Cöthen: P. Schettler, 1880), 97; Thomas Watters, Lao-tzu:

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13 14 15 16

17

18

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28

Notes A Study in Chinese Philosophy (Hong Kong: Printed at the “China Mail” Office, 1870), 35, 40, 55; Alexander Winchell, Reconciliation of Science and Religion (New York: Harper, 1877), 49. Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, 84. On his assessment of Daoism, compare Israel Aharon Ben-Yosef, “Confucianism and Taoism in The Star of Redemption.” Journal for the Study of Religion 1 (September 1988): 25–36. On the underappreciated role of the “I” in early Daoist sources, see Eric S. Nelson, “Levinas and Kierkegaard: The Akedah, the Dao, and Aporetic Ethics.” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 40.1 (2013): 164–184, in particular 166–167. Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, 45–46. Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, 45–46. Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, 45–46. Martin Buber, Reden und Gleichnisse des Tschuang Tse (Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1910). Published in English translation in Martin Buber, Chinese Tales: Zhuangzi, Sayings and Parables and Chinese Ghost and Love Stories, trans. Alex Page (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1991) and in Jonathan R. Herman, I and Tao: Martin Buber’s Encounter with Chuang Tzu (Albany : State University of New York Press, 1993). Buber’s “afterword” (Nachwort) to the selections from the Zhuangzi is also published in English in Buber, Pointing the Way, 31–58. May stresses the significance of the language of Buber’s Zhuangzi for Heidegger in Reinhard May, Heidegger’s Hidden Sources: East Asian Influences on His Work, trans. Graham Parkes (London: Routledge, 1996), 39–40. On the dialectic of the human and the inhuman in the Zhuangzi, see Eric S. Nelson, “The Human and the Inhuman: Ethics and Religion in the Zhuangzi.” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 41.S1 (2014): 723–739. Maurice S. Friedman, Martin Buber: The Life of Dialogue (London: Routledge, 2002), 31. Martin Buber, Chinesische Geister- und Liebesgeschichten (Frankfurt: Rütten und Loening, 1911). Published in English in Buber, Chinese Tales. Herman, I and Tao, 73. Herman, I and Tao, 72. Herman, I and Tao, 70–72, 76. Friedman, Martin Buber, 32. Compare Friedman, Martin Buber, 33. Compare Friedman, Martin Buber, 33. Buber later argued that Daoism and his own early “mysticism” did not adequately conceptualize evil, which is more radical than separation from and lack of the unity of life. See Buber, Pointing the Way, ix–x. Compare Friedman, Martin Buber, 33. Herman, I and Tao, 85.

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29 David L. Hall and Roger T. Ames, Thinking from the Han: Self, Truth, and Transcendence in Chinese and Western Culture (Albany : State University of New York Press, 1998), 305. 30 Herman, I and Tao, 86; JeeLoo Liu, An Introduction to Chinese Philosophy: From Ancient Philosophy to Chinese Buddhism (Malden: Blackwell, 2006), 172. 31 Herman, I and Tao, 93. 32 The word Gelassenheit, frequently translated as “letting releasement,” appears once in Buber’s edition of the Zhuangzi, but without any special significance; Buber, Reden und Gleichnisse des Tschuang-tse, 14. 33 Note that Buber’s “China and Us” lecture was also described above in Chapter 1, with regard to its account of Confucius, and Wilhelm and the China Institute previously discussed in Chapter 2. 34 Buber, “China und wir,” 205–212. Translation from Buber, Pointing the Way, 121. 35 Buber, Pointing the Way, 124–125. 36 Buber, Pointing the Way, 125. 37 Buber, Pointing the Way, 124–125. 38 Buber, “Lao Tzu al hashilton,” 6–8. This short piece includes passages from the Daodejing concerning government. Buber also discussed Laozi as a political thinker in “Society and the State” (1951), published in English in Buber, Pointing the Way, 161–176. 39 See Bret W. Davis, “Heidegger and Asian Philosophy,” in François Raffoul and Eric S. Nelson (eds.), Bloomsbury Companion to Heidegger, expanded paperback edition (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 460. 40 Heinrich Wiegand Petzet, Encounters and Dialogues with Martin Heidegger 1929–1976, trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 18–19. 41 Petzet, Encounters and Dialogues with Martin Heidegger, 59, 169. 42 Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe Volume 77 (GA 77): Feldweg-Gespräche (1944/45), ed. Ingrid Schüssler (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1995), 239; Martin Heidegger, Country Path Conversations, trans. Bret W. Davis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 156–157. 43 Martin Heidegger, Überlieferte Sprache und technische Sprache (St. Gallen: Erker, 1989), 7–8. 44 Heidegger, GA 77, 220; Country Path Conversations, 143. 45 Heidegger, GA 77, 213; Country Path Conversations, 138. 46 Heidegger, GA 77, 229; Country Path Conversations, 149. 47 Heidegger, GA 77, 229; Country Path Conversations, 149. 48 Heidegger, GA 77, 211–212; Country Path Conversations, 136–137, 76. Also note Martin Heidegger, GA 76 Leitgedanken zur Entstehung der Metaphysik, der neuzeitlichen Wissenschaft und der modernen Technik (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 2009), 46–47, 300.

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49 Heidegger, GA 77, 230; Country Path Conversations, 149–150. 50 Paul Shih-yi Hsiao, “Heidegger and Our Translation of the Tao Te Ching,” in Graham Parkes (ed.), Heidegger and Asian Thought (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1990), 93–101. Compare May, Heidegger’s Hidden Sources, 54, and Davis, “Heidegger and Asian Philosophy,” 460–461. 51 Martin Heidegger, GA 75 Zu Hölderlin/Griechenlandreisen, ed. Curd Ochwadt (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000), 43. See the helpful contextualization and analysis of this passage in Xianglong Zhang, “The Coming Time ‘Between’ Being and Daoist Emptiness: An Analysis of Heidegger’s Article Inquiring into the Uniqueness of the Poet via the Lao Zi.” Philosophy East and West 59.1 (2009): 78. 52 Martin Heidegger, “Das Ding” (1950), in Vorträge und Aufsätze (Pfullingen: Neske, 1954), 161; Heidegger, “The Thing,” Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 169. 53 Heidegger, “Das Ding,” 161; Poetry, Language, Thought, 170. 54 Translation modified. Martin Heidegger, “Das Wesen der Sprache” (1950), in Unterwegs zur Sprache (Pfullingen: Neske, 1975), 197–198; Heidegger, On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 92. 55 Heidegger, “Das Wesen der Sprache,” 197–198; On the Way to Language, 92. 56 Martin Buber, Paths in Utopia (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), 8–9. 57 Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in D. F. Krell (ed. and trans.), Basic Writings (San Francisco: Harper, 1993), 217. 58 Martin Buber, The Way of Response, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (New York: Schocken Books, 1966), 69. 59 Buber, Between Man and Man, 204–205. 60 Martin Heidegger, GA 79 Bremer und Freiburger Vorträge, ed. Petra Jaeger (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 2005), 93; Martin Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, trans. Andrew J. Mitchell (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 89. 61 Helmuth Plessner, “Die Utopie in der Maschine” (1924), in Gesammelte Werke 10 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985), 31–40. Translation modified from Jan-Werner Müller, “The Soul in the Age of Society and Technology: Helmuth Plessner’s Defensive Liberalism,” in John P. McCormick (ed.), Confronting Mass Democracy and Industrial Technology: Political and Social Theory from Nietzsche to Habermas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 139. 62 May, Heidegger’s Hidden Sources, 39–40.

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Chapter 5 1

Martin Heidegger, GA 18 Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 2002), 4; trans. Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009). Contrary to Heidegger’s thesis, this work has illustrated multiple cases of the significance of biography for philosophy. For a fuller account of the import of the biographical dimension for interpreting philosophy, see Jin Y. Park, Women and Buddhist Philosophy: Engaging Zen Master Kim Iryŏp (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2017). 2 Georg Misch, Der Aufbau der Logik auf dem Boden der Philosophie des Lebens: Göttinger Vorlesungen über Logik und Einleitung in die Theorie des Wissens (Freiburg: Alber, 1994), 566. 3 On the European character of modernization and globalization, compare Heidegger, GA 79, 65; trans. Bremen and Freiburg Lectures: Insight into That Which Is and Basic Principles of Thinking (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012); as well as Martin Heidegger, Sojourns: The Journey to Greece (Albany : State University of New York Press, 2005), 25–26. 4 On history in Heidegger and Dilthey, see Eric S. Nelson, “History as Decision and Event in Heidegger.” Arhe 4.8 (2007): 97–115 and Eric S. Nelson, “Interpreting Practice: Epistemology, Hermeneutics, and Historical Life in Dilthey.” Idealistic Studies 38.1–2 (2008): 105–122. 5 Compare the careful and insightful analysis of Heidegger in Lin Ma, Heidegger on East-West Dialogue: Anticipating the Event (New York: Routledge, 2008). 6 Such as “A Dialogue on Language between a Japanese and an Inquirer” (1958); published in Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 1–56. 7 Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 224. 8 Martin Heidegger, What Is Philosophy? trans. William Kluback and Jean T. Wilde (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1956), 31. 9 Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, 137. 10 Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, 137. 11 On the reverse or negative Eurocentrism of the deconstruction of the history of Western metaphysics as logocentrism, see Eric S. Nelson, “The Yijing and Philosophy: From Leibniz to Derrida.” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 38.3 (2011): 382–385, 388–389. For an alternative onto-generative conception of hermeneutical philosophy in critical response to Heidegger’s ontological thinking, see Chung-ying Cheng, “Confucius, Heidegger, and the Philosophy of the I Ching: A Comparative Inquiry into the Truth of Human Being.” Philosophy East and West 37.1 (1987): 51–70. 12 Martin Heidegger, GA 16 Veröffentlichte Schriften 1910–1976, Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges: 1910–1976 (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000), 333.

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13 Martin Heidegger, GA 39 Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein” (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1999), 173. 14 Martin Heidegger, GA 13 Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens 1910–1976 (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 2002), 21. 15 Martin Heidegger, “Europa und die deutsche Philosophie,” in Hans-Helmut Gander (ed.), Europa und die Philosophie (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1993), 31. 16 Heidegger, Sojourns, 27. 17 Compare Ma’s discussion of this passage in Heidegger on East-West Dialogue, 118. 18 Richard Wolin, The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 113. 19 Georg W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes (Stuttgart: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2013), 52. 20 I developed this point further in relation to early Chinese thinking in Eric S. Nelson, “Responding to Heaven and Earth: Daoism, Heidegger and Ecology.” Environmental Philosophy 1.2 (2004): 65–74. 21 Nelson, “The Yijing and Philosophy,” 388–389. 22 One of the most questionable expressions of this dyad is evident in Levinas’s remark: “I always say—but under my breath—that the Bible and the Greeks present the only serious issues in human life; everything else is dancing.” Emmanuel Levinas and Jill Robbins, Is It Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 149. I discuss the case of Levinas and China, the misunderstandings and possibilities for communication, in Eric S. Nelson, “Levinas and Early Confucian Ethics: Religion, Rituality, and the Sources of Morality.” Levinas Studies 4 (2009): 77–207. The Eurocentrisms of Levinas and Derrida are arguably developed in Nemo, What Is the West? and Gasché, Europe, or the Infinite Task. 23 Particularly Georg Misch, Lebensphilosophie und Phanomenologie (Leipzig: Teubner, 1931); Helmuth Plessner, Macht und menschliche Natur (1931) republished in Gesammelte Schriften 5: Macht und menschliche Natur (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981). 24 Martin Heidegger, GA 27 Einleitung in die Philosophie (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 2001). 25 Martin Heidegger, SZ 527, fn 14: “This is not necessary since we have G. Misch to thank for a concrete presentation of Dilthey that aims at the central tendencies that is essential to any discussion of his work.” Compare Charles B. Guignon, Heidegger and the Problem of Knowledge (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), 49. 26 Misch, Lebensphilosophie und Phanomenologie. 27 Compare, however, Cheng, “Confucius, Heidegger, and the Philosophy of the I Ching,” 51–70. The Yijing’s logic of the multiplicity and temporal transience of origins can well be said to offer a context to reinterpret Misch’s argumentation in contrast with Heidegger’s more monistic depiction of the origin.

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28 Heidegger criticizes Dilthey’s ontic pluralism in GA 27, 347–350. I examine the difference between Dilthey and Heidegger concerning worldviews and ontic multiplicity in Eric S. Nelson, “The World Picture and Its Conflict in Dilthey and Heidegger.” Humana.Mente: Journal of Philosophical Studies 18 (2011): 19–38. 29 Despite the limitations of Heidegger’s approach in relation to non-Western philosophy and the multiple origins of philosophy, Heidegger’s practice of formalization and emptying remains significant in a comparative philosophical context. I developed this point further in Chapter 8 of this book on Heidegger, Chan Buddhism, and the question of the nothing. On formal indication, see Eric S. Nelson, “Questioning Practice: Heidegger, Historicity and the Hermeneutics of Facticity.” Philosophy Today 44 (2001): 150–159; Eric S. Nelson, “Heidegger and the Ethics of Facticity,” in François Raffoul and Eric S. Nelson (eds.), Rethinking Facticity (Albany : State University of New York Press, 2008), 129–147. 30 On the logic of transformational multiplicity and unity in the Yijing, see Cheng, “Confucius, Heidegger, and the Philosophy of the I Ching,” 51–70. 31 Misch, Lebensphilosophie und Phanomenologie, 14; Plessner, Macht und menschliche Natur, 157. 32 Plessner, Macht und menschliche Natur, 157. 33 Misch, “Von den Gestaltungen der Persönlichkeit,” 82. 34 Misch, Der Weg in die Philosophie; which was published in a substantially altered and revised English translation as The Dawn of Philosophy. 35 Misch, Der Weg in die Philosophie, 29; The Dawn of Philosophy, 39. 36 Misch, Der Weg in die Philosophie, 13; The Dawn of Philosophy, 1, 12. 37 Misch, The Dawn of Philosophy, 39. 38 Misch, Der Weg in die Philosophie, 14; The Dawn of Philosophy, 16. 39 Misch, The Dawn of Philosophy, 25. 40 Misch, The Dawn of Philosophy, 25. 41 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy: The Lectures of 1825–1826 (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1990), 9–10. 42 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction, Reason in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 97. 43 Misch, The Dawn of Philosophy, 44. 44 “Die Vernunftgestalt der Persönlichkeit ist sowohl chinesisches als griechisches und modern-europäisches Aufklärungsgut.” Misch, “Von den Gestaltungen der Persönlichkeit,” 95. 45 On hermeneutical Enlightenment, and the relation between Chinese and European Enlightenments, see Eric S. Nelson, “Leibniz and China: Religion, Hermeneutics, and Enlightenment.” Religion in the Age of Enlightenment 1 (2009): 277–300. 46 Misch, The Dawn of Philosophy, 172. 47 Misch, The Dawn of Philosophy, 184–187. 48 Misch, Lebensphilosophie und Phanomenologie, 14.

286 49 50 51 52 53

54 55 56

57 58 59 60 61

62

63 64

65 66

67

Notes Misch, The Dawn of Philosophy, 39. Misch, Lebensphilosophie und Phanomenologie, 47. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 97. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 54. For instance, on the significance of Arabic biography, see Georg Misch, Geschichte de Autobiographie (Bern and Frankfurt: A. Francke und Gerhard Schultke-Bulmke, 1949–69), III, 2, 980. Misch, The Dawn of Philosophy, 7. Compare Misch, Lebensphilosophie und Phanomenologie, 317. On the problematic reduction of the Zhuangzi to unitary positions such as mysticism and skepticism, see Eric S. Nelson, “Questioning Dao: Skepticism, Mysticism, and Ethics in the Zhuangzi.” International Journal of the Asian Philosophical Association 1.1 (2008): 5–19. On literary interpretations and appropriations of the Zhuangzi in modern Chinese literature, see Jianmei Liu, Zhuangzi and Modern Chinese Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Compare Misch, Der Weg in die Philosophie, 221, 229; The Dawn of Philosophy, 202. Misch, Der Weg in die Philosophie, 221. Misch, Lebensphilosophie und Phanomenologie, 89–90. Chung-ying Cheng, New Dimensions of Confucian and Neo-Confucian Philosophy (Albany : State University of New York Press, 1991), 39. Yang Chengyin ἞៤ᆙ, Cheng Zhongying taiji chuang hua lun ៤Ё㣅໾Ὁࡉ࣪ 䂪 (Chung-ying Cheng’s Taichai Creation Theory) (Hangzhou: Zhejiang University Press, 2012). On Hegel’s misinterpretation of the Yijing and his critique of Chinese “imagethinking,” see Nelson, “The Yijing and Philosophy,” 377–396. On the role of dialectical images, emotions, gender, and the body in the Yijing, See Eric S. Nelson and Liu Yang, “The Yijing, Gender, and the Ethics of Nature,” in Ann A. PangWhite (ed.), The Bloomsbury Research Handbook to Chinese Philosophy and Gender (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2016), 267–288. For instance, “ljᯧNJ㗙ˈ䈵г˗䈵г㗙ˈ‫ڣ‬гDŽ” Xici 㐿䖁 II:3. Chung‐Ying Cheng, “The Yijing: The Creative Origin of Chinese Philosophy,” in William Edelglass and Jay L. Garfield (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of World Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 13–25. Cheng, New Dimensions of Confucian and Neo-Confucian Philosophy, 39. Chung-ying Cheng, “Onto-Hermeneutical Vision and Analytic Discourse: Interpretation and Reconstruction in Chinese Philosophy,” in Bo Mou (ed.), Two Roads to Wisdom? Chinese and Analytic Philosophical Traditions (Chicago: Open Court, 2001), 94. Chung-ying Cheng, “The Origins of Chinese Philosophy,” in Brian Carr and Indira Mahalingam (eds.), Companion Encyclopedia of Asian Philosophy (London:

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69

70 71

72 73

74

75 76

77 78 79 80

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Routledge, 1997), 452. For a comprehensive account of yinyang thinking, see Robin Wang, Yinyang: The Way of Heaven and Earth in Chinese Thought and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). On the body and root-body orienting thinking, see Chung‐ying Cheng, “On the Metaphysical Significance of Ti (Body–Embodiment) in Chinese Philosophy: Benti (Origin–Substance) and Ti–Yong (Substance and Function).” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 29.2 (2002): 145–161. Robert F. Campany, “Xunzi and Durkheim as Theorists of Ritual Practice,” in Frank Reynolds and David Tracy (eds.), Discourse and Practice (Albany : State University of New York Press, 1992), 206. Fabrizio Pregadio, Encyclopedia of Taoism, Volume 1 (London: Routledge, 2005), 1086. I develop this point more fully in another context in Eric S. Nelson, “Generativities: Western Philosophy, Chinese Painting, and the Yijing.” Orbis Idearum 1.1 (2013): 97–104; and Nelson and Yang, “The Yijing, Gender, and the Ethics of Nature,” 267–288. Compare Cheng, New Dimensions of Confucian and Neo-Confucian Philosophy, 82. Also compare Nelson, “Generativities,” 100. See, for example, “ljᯧNJ᳄ᅧ᠆⇣ӄ㾔䈵ᮐ໽ˈ‫׃‬㾔⊩ᮐഄˈ㾔効⥌П᭛ˈ 㟛ഄПᅰˈ䖥প䃌䑿ˈ䘴প䃌⠽ˈᮐᰃྟ԰ܿऺˈҹ䗮⼲ᯢПᖋˈҹ串㨀 ⠽ПᚙDŽ ” Liu, Zhaoyou ࡝‫⼤ܚ‬, Zhongguo mulu xue Ё೟Ⳃ䣘ᅌ (The Study of Chinese Bibliography) (Taibei Shi: Wu nan tu shu chu ban gong si, 2002), 32. For an analysis of this alternative onto-generative conception of hermeneutical philosophy in critical response to Heidegger’s ontological thinking, see Cheng, “Confucius, Heidegger, and the Philosophy of the I Ching,” 51–70. Cheng, New Dimensions of Confucian and Neo-Confucian Philosophy, 171; “On the Metaphysical Significance of Ti (Body–Embodiment) in Chinese Philosophy,” 148. Compare Chung-ying Cheng, “On the Environmental Ethics of the Tao and the Ch’i.” Environmental Ethics 8.4 (1986): 351–370; Chung-ying Cheng, “The Trinity of Cosmology, Ecology, and Ethics in Confucian Personhood,” in Mary Evelyn Tucker (ed.), Confucianism and Ecology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 211–235. As Lin Ma demonstrated in her significant and useful study Heidegger on East-West Dialogue. Plessner, Macht und menschliche Natur, 162–163. Plessner, Macht und menschliche Natur, 164, 185. On the meontological character of Daoist nothingness, see David Chai, “Daoism and Wu.” Philosophy Compass 9.10 (2014): 663–671; and David Chai, “Nothingness and the Clearing: Heidegger, Daoism and the Quest for Primal Clarity.” The Review of Metaphysics 67.3 (2014): 583–601.

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Chapter 6 1

On Husserl’s interpretation of and significance for Buddhism, see the following helpful discussions: Kwok-Ying Lau, “Husserl, Buddhism and the Crisis of European Sciences,” in Lau, Phenomenology and Intercultural Understanding: Toward a New Cultural Flesh (Dordrecht: Springer, 2016), 53–66; Mary Larrabee, “The One and the Many: Yogacara Buddhism and Husserl.” Philosophy East and West 31.1 (1981): 3–15; Sebastian Luft, “Sokrates-Buddha: An Unpublished Manuscript from the Archives by Edmund Husserl.” Husserl Studies 26.1 (2010): 1–17; Dan Lusthaus, Buddhist Phenomenology: A Philosophical Investigation of Yogācāra Buddhism and the Ch’eng Weishih Lun (London: Routledge, 2002); Liangkang Ni, “Husserl und der Buddhismus.” Husserl Studies 27.2 (2011): 143–160; Liangkang Ni, Zur Sache des Bewusstseins: Phänomenologie, Buddhismus, Konfuzianismus (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2010). 2 Daniel Dennett, “Who’s on First? Heterophenomenology Explained.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 10.9–10 (2003): 19–30; John R. Searle, “The Phenomenological Illusion,” in Searle, Philosophy in a New Century: Selected Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 107–136; Dan Zahavi, “The End of What? Phenomenology vs. Speculative Realism.” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 24.3 (2016): 289–309. 3 See Franz Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (London: Routledge, 1995), 88–89. 4 Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book, trans. Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2014), 35. 5 Natalie Depraz and Dan Zahavi (eds.), Alterity and Facticity: New Perspectives on Husserl (Dordrecht: Springer, 1998); François Raffoul and E. S. Nelson (eds.), Rethinking Facticity (Albany : State University of New York Press, 2008). 6 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1996), A370. 7 Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (Dordrecht: Springer, 1977). 8 On Abhidharma and Yogācāra, compare respectively Evan Thompson, Waking, Dreaming, Being: New Light on the Self and Consciousness from Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 36; Lusthaus, Buddhist Phenomenology, 15, 33, 64; on the priority of intentionality, also see Christian Coseru, Perceiving Reality: Consciousness, Intentionality, and Cognition in Buddhist Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 9. 9 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 84. 10 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), vii.

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11 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany : State University of New York Press, 2010), 30. 12 Eric S. Nelson, “Heidegger’s Failure to Overcome Transcendental Philosophy,” in Halla Kim and Steven Hoeltzel (eds.), Transcendental Inquiry: Its History, Methods and Critiques (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016): 159–179. 13 Respectively published in Edmund Husserl, Husserliana XXVII: Aufsätze und Vorträge (1922–1937) (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989); Edmund Husserl, Husserliana VI: Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), translated into English as Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970). 14 See the introduction to Jin Y. Park and Gereon Kopf (eds.), Merleau-Ponty and Buddhism (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2009), 1–13. 15 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 128. 16 Georg W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 255, 258; also compare Georg W. F. Hegel, The Science of Logic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 75. Bernard Faure misinterprets Hegel’s criticism as an endorsement of Buddhism, interpreted as a philosophy of the absolute and plenitude, in Bernard Faure, Unmasking Buddhism (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 25. On the nihilistic interpretation of Buddhism, see Max Müller, Über den Buddhistischen Nihilismus (Kiel: Mohr, 1869). Also compare Urs App, The Birth of Orientalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); Roger-Pol Droit, The Cult of Nothingness: The Philosophers and the Buddha (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). 17 See Faure, Unmasking Buddhism, 25, 26. 18 On Schopenhauer’s elucidation of Buddhism, compare Faure, Unmasking Buddhism, 26. Also see Dorothea W. Dauer, Schopenhauer as Transmitter of Buddhist Ideas (Berne: Lang, 1969); on the influence of Schopenhauer’s interpretation, see Urs App, Richard Wagner and Buddhism (Kyoto: UniversityMedia, 2011); Heinrich Dumoulin, “Buddhism and Nineteenth-Century German Philosophy.” Journal of the History of Ideas 42.3 (1981): 457–470. 19 On Nietzsche’s interpretation of Buddhism, see Bret W. Davis, “Zen after Zarathustra: The Problem of the Will in the Confrontation between Nietzsche and Buddhism.” The Journal of Nietzsche Studies 28.1 (2004): 89–138; Robert G. Morrison, Nietzsche and Buddhism: A Study in Nihilism and Ironic Affinities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Antoine Panaïoti, Nietzsche and Buddhist Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Graham Parkes, “Nietzsche and East Asian Thought: Influences, Impacts, and Resonances,” in Bernd Magnus and

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21

22

23

24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

Notes Kathleen Higgins (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 356–383; André Van der Braak, Nietzsche and Zen: Self-Overcoming without a Self (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2011). See Qiuhua Hu, Konfuzianisches Ethos und westliche Wissenschaft: Wang Guowei (1877–1927) und das Ringen um das moderne China (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016); also compare Gail Hershatter, Remapping China: Fissures in Historical Terrain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 197; Lixin Shao, Nietzsche in China (New York: P. Lang, 1999), 18. For his essays on Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, see Wang, Guowei ⥟೟㎁, Wang Guowei ji ⥟೟㎁䲚 (Works of Wang Guowei) (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 2008), vol.2. Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Die Wirtschaft und die Gesellschaftlichen Ordnungen und Mächte (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 2001), 264. Also compare Bryan S. Turner, “Max Weber and the Spirit of Resentment: The Nietzsche legacy.” Journal of Classical Sociology 11.1 (2011): 75–92. Max Weber, Die Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen: Hinduismus und Buddhismus: Schriften 1915–1920 (Tübingen: Mohr, 1998); Max Weber, The Religion of India: The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism (Glencoe: Free Press, 1958). Compare Richard Cohen, Beyond Enlightenment: Buddhism, Religion, Modernity (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), 7–13; Dale S. Wright, What Is Buddhist Enlightenment? (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 200–201. Carl Friedrich Köppen, Die Religion des Buddha. Vol. 1. Die Religion des Buddha und ihre Entstehung (Berlin: F. Schneider, 1857). Ernst Mach, The Analysis of Sensations and the Relation of the Physical to the Psychical (Chicago: Open Court, 1914), 356; Rudolf Haller, Friedrich Stadler, Ernst Mach: Werk und Wirkung (Vienna: Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1988), 242–243. On Mach’s interest in Buddhism as an Enlightenment-oriented empiricism, an interest described as lacking religious or metaphysical sensibility, compare Hermann Keyserling, Das Reisetagebuch eines Philosophen, vol. 1 (Darmstadt: O. Reichl, 1919), 47–48. Karl Jaspers, Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus: The Paradigmatic Individuals (New York: Harcourt, 1962). See Luft, “Sokrates-Buddha,” 1, 2. For instance, Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Texte aus dem Nachlass (1973), 241. Luft, “Sokrates-Buddha,” 5. Luft, “Sokrates-Buddha,” 5. Luft, “Sokrates-Buddha,” 17. Luft, “Sokrates-Buddha,” 5. Luft, “Sokrates-Buddha,” 5; also compare the careful discussion of this text in Lau, Phenomenology and Intercultural Understanding, 59–64. Edmund Husserl, “Über die Reden Gotamo Buddhos,” in Husserl, Aufsätze und Vorträge, 125–126. It was first published in Der Piperbote für Kunst und Literatur, Vol. 2, No. 1 (1925), 18–19.

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35 Husserl, Aufsätze und Vorträge, 125, 126; compare Lau, Phenomenology and Intercultural Understanding, 57, 58. Lau provides an English translation of this text that I have relied upon in this discussion. 36 Georg Misch, The Dawn of Philosophy: A Philosophical Primer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951), 15. 37 Husserl, Aufsätze und Vorträge, 125; Lau, Phenomenology and Intercultural Understanding, 58. 38 Husserl, Aufsätze und Vorträge, 125, 126; Lau, Phenomenology and Intercultural Understanding, 57. 39 Husserl, Aufsätze und Vorträge, 107. 40 Edmund Husserl, “Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft.” Logos 1 (1910–11): 289–341. Edmund Husserl, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science.” New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 2 (2002): 249–295. 41 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 4. 42 See Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 6; Luft, “Sokrates-Buddha,” 1–17. 43 Compare John Dewey, The Middle Works, 1899–1924 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), 506; Dermot Moran, Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 26; Heinrich Rickert, Philosophische Aufsätze (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999), 445. 44 Edmund Husserl, Husserliana VII: Erste Philosophie (1923/24), Erster Teil (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1956), 203–207. 45 Husserl, Aufsätze und Vorträge, 73. 46 Husserl, Aufsätze und Vorträge, 3, 95. 47 For early comparisons of phenomenology and Buddhism, see Stanislaw Shayer, “Vorarbeiten zur Geschichte der mahāyānistischen Erlösungslehren.” Zeitschrift für Buddhismus 3 (1921): 356, 361. Also note the second section on “Transzendentalphilosophie und Buddhismus” in Joachim Pohl, Philosophie der tragischen Strukturen: Beiträge zur Grundlegung einer metaphysischen Weltanschauung, part one: Metaphysik der Erkenntnis (Vienna: W. Braumüller, 1935). 48 Dorion Cairns, Conversations with Husserl and Fink (Dordrecht: Springer, 1976). 49 Cairns, Conversations with Husserl and Fink, 50. 50 Compare Ronald Bruzina, “Last Philosophy: Ideas for a Transcendental Phenomenological Metaphysics: Eugen Fink with Edmund Husserl, 1928–1938”; J. N. Mohanty, “Phenomenology and Indian Philosophy: The Concept of Rationality.” Karl Schumann, “Husserl and Indian Thought,” in Debi Prasad Chattopadhyaya, Lester E. Embree and Jitendranath Mohanty (eds.), Phenomenology and Indian Philosophy (Albany : State University of New York Press, 1992), respectively, 270–289, 8–19, and 20–43. 51 Eugen Fink, Nietzsche’s Philosophy, trans. Goetz Richter (London: Bloomsbury, 2003), 98, 113.

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52 Eugen Fink, Pädagogische Kategorienlehre (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1995), 182. 53 Eugen Fink, Die Doktorarbeit und erste Assistenzjahre bei Husserl (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 2006), 255. 54 Eugen Fink, Metaphysik und Tod (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1969), 160. 55 Eugen Fink, Phanomenologische Werkstatt: Bernauer Zeitmanuskripte, vol. 2 (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 2006), 56 Fink, Phänomenologische Werkstatt, 306. 57 See Max Scheler, “The Meaning of Suffering,” in Scheler, On Feeling, Knowing, and Valuing: Selected Writings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 82–115, in particular 101. 58 On the Buddhist and Christian conceptions of suffering, see Scheler, On Feeling, Knowing, and Valuing, 97–110. On Scheler’s interpretation of pain and suffering, note Saulius Geniusas, “Max Scheler’s Phenomenology of Pain.” Frontiers of Philosophy in China 11.3 (2016): 358–376. 59 Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 134/GA 65, 171. 60 Compare Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 1 (Stuttgart: Neske, 1961), 112, 320; or Martin Heidegger, Nietzsches metaphysische Grundstellung im abendländischen Denken: Die ewige Wiederkehr des Gleichen (Summer Semester 1937) (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1986), 68, 189; Martin Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000), 116. 61 See William Barrett, “Zen for the West,” introduction to D. T. Suzuki, Zen Buddhism: Selected Writings of D.T, Suzuki (Garden City : Anchor Books, 1956), xi; Reinhard May, Heidegger’s Hidden Sources: East-Asian Influences on his Work (London: Routledge, 1996), 3. 62 Martin Heidegger, Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges: 1910–1976 (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000), GA 16, 679. On Heidegger’s distancing non-identification with Zen, compare Hans-Peter Hempel, Heidegger und Zen (Frankfurt: Athenäum, 1987), 17. 63 Martin Heidegger, Bremer und Freiburger Vorträge (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1994), GA 79, 134. 64 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1967), 9. 65 For instance in the works of Jitendranath Mohanty, Dan Lusthaus, Evan Thompson, and Christian Coseru. 66 May, Heidegger’s Hidden Sources, 85. 67 See Husserl, Aufsätze und Vorträge, 94, 108, 113. 68 Husserl, Aufsätze und Vorträge, 94. 69 Classic accounts of Husserl’s Crisis are offered in R. Philip Buckley, Husserl, Heidegger and the Crisis of Philosophical Responsibility (Dordrecht: Springer, 2012); David Carr, Phenomenology and the Problem of History: A Study of

Notes

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80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96

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Husserl’s Transcendental Philosophy (Northwestern University Press, 2009); James Dodd, Crisis and Reflection: An Essay on Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006); Moran, Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Also see David J. Hyder and HansJörg Rheinberger (eds.), Science and the Life-World: Essays on Husserl’s Crisis of European Sciences (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (London: Penguin, 2002). Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, 270. Also note Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 125. Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, 269. Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, 271. Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, 271, 299. Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, 295. Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, 271, 272. Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, 272. Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, 16. For contrasting perspectives on this problem, compare Dipesh Chakarbarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 29; Rodolphe Gasché, Europe, or the Infinite Task: A Study of a Philosophical Concept (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 24. Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, 273. Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, 274. Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, 210, 299; Hans Driesch and Margarete Driesch, Fern-Ost als gäste Jungchinas (Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus, 1925), 302. Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, 274. Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, 275. Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, 275. Franz Rosenzweig, Der Mensch und Sein Werk: Briefe und Tagebücher (Dordrecht Springer, 2013), 768. Rosenzweig, Der Mensch und Sein Werk, 767, 768. Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, 275. Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, 16. Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, 279. Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, 275. Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, 16. Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, 290. Compare Jacques Derrida, Heidegger: The Question of Being and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 123. Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, 290. Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, 290. See Gasché, Europe, or the Infinite Task; Philippe Nemo, What Is the West? (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2006).

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97 On the irreducible plural structure of worlds and we-horizons, see Edmund Husserl, Husserliana XXXIX: Die Lebenswelt: Auslegungen der vorgegebenen Welt und ihrer Konstitution. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1916–1937), ed. by Rochus Sowa (Dordrecht: Springer, 2008), 173–174. On the significance of homeworld/ alienworld in Husserl, see Anthony Steinbock, Home and Beyond: Generative Phenomenology after Husserl (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1995). On the notion of horizon in Husserl, see Saulius Geniusas, The Origins of the Horizon in Husserl’s Phenomenology (Dordrecht: Springer, 2012). 98 Cairns, Conversations with Husserl and Fink, 21; Husserl repeatedly returns to the example of understanding the Chinese as an exemplar of foreignness in Husserl, Die Lebenswelt, 157–163, 169, 171, 341–342, 524, 538, 549, and 691. 99 Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, 277. 100 Compare Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 119–139. 101 Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, 290. 102 On the lifeworld in Husserl and Habermas, see Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2, 119–139. 103 Compare Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2, 119–139 as well as the discussion of Habermas’s conception of hermeneutics in Rudolf A. Makkreel, Orientation and Judgment in Hermeneutics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 52. 104 Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, 275. 105 On the German conception of Greece, and its humanistic and romantic variations, see the classic study by Eliza Marian Butler, The Tyranny of Greece over Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935); compare also Dennis J. Schmidt, On Germans and other Greeks: Tragedy and Ethical Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001). 106 Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, 280. 107 Compare the editorial description to Edmund Husserl, Husserliana XXXV: Einleitung in die Philosophie: Vorlesungen 1922/23 (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2003), 721. 108 Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, 279. 109 Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, 279–280. 110 Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, 283. 111 Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, 279. 112 Compare Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, 282–283. 113 Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, 389. 114 Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, 299; compare Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion (London: Routledge, 2001), 155. 115 Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 121.

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116 Compare Derrida, Of Spirit, 120; Jacques Derrida, Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2001 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 72; Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), xxix; Jacques Derrida, The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 154. 117 Jacques Derrida, Ethics, Institutions, and the Right to Philosophy (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 9. 118 Jacques Derrida, Signature Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 221. 119 Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 40; Martin Heidegger, Einführung in die Metaphysik (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1983), GA 40, 40. 120 Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 40; GA 40, 40–41. 121 Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 40; GA 40, 41. 122 Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 41; GA 40, 41. Compare Gasché, Europe, or the Infinite Task, 113. 123 Compare May, Heidegger’s Hidden Sources, 50; Joseph O’Leary, “Western Hospitality to Eastern Thought,” in Richard Kearney and James Taylor (eds.), Hosting the Stranger: Between Religions (London: Continuum, 2011), 23–34. Also compare the earlier discussion of this problem in Chapter 5. 124 Martin Heidegger, Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, trans. Keith Hoeller (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2000), 201; also compare May, Heidegger’s Hidden Sources, 50; O’Leary, “Western Hospitality to Eastern Thought,” 30. 125 Martin Heidegger, Being and Truth (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 172/ GA 34, 225. 126 Martin Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister” (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 54. 127 Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 41; GA 40, 41. 128 Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art” in Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 60. 129 See my argument about this Hegelian legacy in Derrida and Rorty in Eric S. Nelson, “The Yijing and Philosophy: From Leibniz to Derrida.” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 38.3 (2011): 377–396. 130 Martin Heidegger, Über den Anfang (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 2005), GA 70, 107. 131 Martin Heidegger, What Is Philosophy? (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1956), 35. 132 Heidegger, What Is Philosophy? 31. 133 Martin Heidegger, Was heißt Denken? (Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1954), 136. 134 Martin Heidegger, Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1983), GA 13, 15–21. 135 Tezuka Tomio, “An Hour with Heidegger,” trans. Graham Parkes, in May, Heidegger’s Hidden Sources, 61–65.

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136 Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 2. 137 Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics and Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 23. 138 Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics and Criticism, 21, 22.

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On the hermeneutics of Leibniz’s interpretive approach to Chinese philosophy, see Nelson, “Leibniz and China,” 277–300. For a comprehensive account, see Perkins, Leibniz and China. On Buber’s early hermeneutical openness toward Daoism, see Chapter 4 and Herman, I and Tao. On Buber’s understanding of Asian philosophy, see Friedman, “Martin Buber and Asia,” 411–426. Buber, Hasidism, 188. Buber, Hasidism, 199–200. Translation modified from Martin Heidegger and National Socialism: Questions and Answers, ed. G. Neske and E. Kettering, trans. L. Harries (New York: Paragon House, 1990), 62–63. Schûej Ôhasama [Ohazama Shuei] and August Faust (eds.), Zen: Der lebendige Buddhismus in Japan: Ausgewählte Stücke des Zen-Textes (Gotha/Stuttgart: Friedrich Andreas Perthes, 1925); Hermann Glockner, Heidelberger Bilderbuch. Erinnerungen (Bonn: H. Bouvier, 1969). For an excellent discussion of these sources and their possible influence on Heidegger, compare Graham Parkes, “Rising Sun over Black Forest,” in Reinhard May, Heidegger’s Hidden Sources: East-Asian Influences on His Work, trans. with an essay by Graham Parkes (London: Routledge, 1996), 79–117. Translation modified, the complete translation reads: The corny exoticism of such decorative world views as the astonishingly consumable Zen Buddhist one casts light upon today’s restorative philosophies. Like Zen, they simulate a thinking posture which the history stored in the subjects makes impossible to assume. Restricting the mind to thoughts open and attainable at the historical stage of its experience is an element of freedom; nonconceptual vagary represents the opposite of freedom. Doctrines which heedlessly run off from the subject to the universe, along with the philosophy of Being, are more easily brought into accord with the world’s hardened condition and with the chances of success within it than is the tiniest bit of self-reflection by a subject pondering upon itself and its real captivity. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: The Seabury Press, 1973), 68.

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Marcuse’s references to Zen are of a fashion (Mode), without reference to its East Asian contexts and complexity. See, for instance, Herbert Marcuse, Aufsätze und Vorlesungen 1948–1969: Versuch über die Befreiung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1984), 78. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon, 1964), 13–14. There are legitimate concerns regarding the commodification of meditation and the consumerism of the “tranquility industry.” The dangers of Buddhism as consumerist commodity are discussed in Allan Hunt Badiner (ed.), Mindfulness in the Marketplace: Compassionate Responses to Consumerism (Berkeley : Parallax Press, 2002). Jürgen Habermas, Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970). Koestler’s arguments about “Asian mysticism” are primarily developed in two works: Arthur Koestler, The Yogi and the Commissar (New York: Macmillan, 1945), and Arthur Koestler, The Lotus and the Robot (London: Hutchinson, 1960). Charles W. Morris, Writings on the General Theory of Signs (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1971), 457. Sidney Hook, “But There Was No Light.” New York Times, “Books” (March 5, 1961). Hook, “But There Was No Light.” Hook, “But There Was No Light.” On the close historical connections between Zen Buddhism and Japanese militarism, see Brian Daizen Victoria, Zen at War (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005); Brian Daizen Victoria, Zen War Stories (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003). Carl Jung, Nietzsche’s “Zarathustra.” Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934–1939 by C. G. Jung. Vol. II. ed., with intro., by James L. Jarrett (London: Routledge, 1989), 1290. Erich Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 67. Carl Jung, Letters of C. G. Jung, Volume 2; Volumes 1951–1961 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 602. Jung, Letters of C. G. Jung, 602. Eugen Herrigel, who lectured in philosophy at Tohoku Imperial University in Sendai during the years 1924–1929 and was an active supporter of National Socialism, popularized an image of Zen spontaneity, naturalness, and oneness between the agent (the archer) and the action (the shooting of the bow) in his Zen in the Art of Archery (London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1953), first published in German as Zen in der Kunst des Bogenschiessens (Konstanz: C. Weller, 1948). On the confluence of German Orientalism and anti-Semitism in the National Socialist era, see Brian Victoria, “Japanese Buddhism in the Third Reich.” Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies 7 (2014): 191–224. For the wider historical context of this confluence, see Gregory Moore, “From Buddhism to Bolshevism: Some Orientalist Themes in German Thought.” German Life and Letters 56.1 (2003): 20–42. Buber, Hasidism, 192.

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23 For a discussion of the transitions in Buber’s thinking and its relation to his changing understanding of Chinese thought, see Jonathan Herman, “The One Gave Birth to the Two: Revisiting Martin Buber’s Encounters with Chinese Religion.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion (2016): doi: 10.1093/jaarel/lfw061. 24 Buber, Hasidism, 187. For a critical comparison of the Hasidic and Zen traditions, see Jacob Yuroh, Zen Buddhism and Hasidism: A Comparative Study (Lanham: University Press of America, 1995). See Chapter 4 for a discussion of Buber’s interpretation of the significance of the Hasidic movement. 25 This is expressed in Buber’s preface to Pointing the Way, ix, in which he is unfair to his own earlier reading of Zhuangzi, and Martin Buber, “One Should Follow the Common,” in The Knowledge of Man (New York: Harper & Row, 1956), 107–108. 26 Buber, Hasidism, 147, 186. 27 Buber, Hasidism, 146–147. 28 Buber, Hasidism, 185. 29 Compare Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken Books, 1995), 249. Scholem denies the affinities between Zen and Hasidic teaching perceived by Buber, arguing that the meditative function of Zen narratives radically distinguishes Zen and Hassidic storytelling. He argues further that Buber’s understanding of Hasidism is more a reflection of his own philosophical project than the Hasidic sources. On the BuberScholem dispute over Hasidism, see Maurice Friedman, “Interpreting Hasidism: The Buber-Scholem Controversy.” The Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 33.1 (1988): 449–467; and Moshe Idel, “Abraham J. Heschel on Mysticism and Hasidism.” Modern Judaism 29.1 (2009): 80–105. 30 Translation modified. Buber, Hasidism, 180. 31 Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (Edinburgh: T &T Clark, 1937), 91. 32 Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, 412. 33 Nishitani Keiji, “Science and Zen,” in Frederick Franck (ed.), The Buddha Eye: An Anthology of the Kyoto School and Its Contemporaries (Bloomington: World Wisdom, 2004), 107–135, 125. 34 Keiji, “Science and Zen,” 125. 35 Buber, I and Thou, 91. 36 Buber, I and Thou, 89, 93. 37 The boundaries of Rosenzweig and Levinas thinking for intercultural hermeneutics should be acknowledged not to reject their thinking, but to think it—and its ethical dimensions—further. I discuss the significance of Levinas’s ethics in conversation with Confucian and Buddhist ethics in Nelson, “Levinas and Early Confucian Ethics,” 177–207; and Eric S. Nelson, “The Complicity of the Ethical: Causality, Karma, and Violence in Buddhism and Levinas,” in Leah Kalmanson, Frank

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46 47

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Garrett and Sarah Mattice (eds.), Levinas and Asian Thought (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2013), 99–114. Levinas, Unforeseen History, 108. Compare Nelson, “Levinas and Early Confucian Ethics,” 177–178. Jill Robbins, Is It Righteous to Be?: Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 149. Emmanuel Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 176. Levinas, Unforeseen History, 108; Slavoj Žižek contends that these remarks disclose the proximity of Levinas (his fear of communist China) and Heidegger (his fear of the Soviet Union) and how Levinas’s ethics is politically impracticable in Organs without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences (New York: Routledge, 2004), 106; compare the more contextualized account of this essay in Howard Caygill, Levinas and the Political (London: Routledge, 2002), 185. Compare Ben-Yosef, “Confucianism and Taoism in The Star of Redemption,” 25–36. Buber addresses these questions of Judaism and Orientalism in his 1912 speech “The Spirit of the Orient and Judaism,” published in English in Martin Buber, On Judaism, ed. Nahum Glatzer (New York: Schocken, 1967), 56–78. Buber’s idea that the modern Jewish people is a fusion of Eastern and Western elements that can function as a mediator and road between East and West is found in cosmopolitan socialist Zionist thought. It can take on the dialogical form we see in Buber or can be presented in tangent with the primacy of Western civilization, as is evident in Moses Hess’s statement that: “You should be the mediators between Europe and far Asia, open the roads that lead to India and China—those unknown regions which must ultimately be thrown open to civilization.” Moses Hess, The Revival of Israel: Rome and Jerusalem, the Last Nationalist Question (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1943), 157. While Hess sees the Jewish people as a vehicle to Westernization and civilization, Buber emphasizes how the Jewish people have historically been a communicative mediator between the Christian and Islamic worlds and can continue to promote intellectual and cultural exchange been Europe and Asia. Buber’s vision of the intersectional and meta-national character of Judaism has had a controversial reception and was an influence in anti-nationalist Zionism, see Noam Pianko, Zionism and the Roads Not Taken: Rawidowicz, Kaplan, Kohn (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 150. On the nexus of silence and language in Buber’s conception of Hasidism, see S. Daniel Breslauer, “Silence and Language in Hasidism: Martin Buber’s View.” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 9.2 (1991): 16–28. Martin Buber, Hasidism and Modern Man (New York: Horizon Press, 1958), 254; Pointing the Way, ix–x; “One Should Follow the Common,” 107–108. Buber, Hasidism, 184–200.

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48 Raphael Jehudah Zwi Werblowsky, Beyond Tradition and Modernity: Changing Religions in a Changing World (London: Athlone Press, 1976), 115. 49 Buber, Hasidism, 192–193. 50 Haim Gordon and Jochanan Bloch (eds.), Martin Buber: A Centenary Volume (New York: Ktav Publishing House for the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, 1984), 364. 51 Gordon et al., Martin Buber, a Centenary Volume, 364. Compare Friedman, “Martin Buber and Asia,” 411–426. 52 Jingde chuan deng lu ᱃ᖋ‫➜ڇ‬䣘 (Records of the Transmission of the Lamp), T51 N2076: 445a05 and 444a01. For Chinese passages, I have used the CBETA Chinese Electronic Tripitaka at http://www.cbeta.org/index.htm. Taishō references are only added when Chinese text is used, and is cited by Taishō number, page number(s), column(s) (a, b, or c), and (if appropriate) line numbers. On the historical context of Hongzhou Chan, see Jinhua Jia, The Hongzhou School of Chan Buddhism (Albany : State University of New York Press, 2006), 67–82. 53 Mazu, translated in Jia, 2006, 123. 54 Mazu, translated in Jia, 2006, 123. 55 Dōgen, Moon in a Dewdrop: Writings of Zen Master Dōgen, ed. Kazuaki Tanahashi (New York: North Point Press, 1995), 98, 102. 56 See James W. Heisig, “Non-I and Thou: Nishida, Buber, and the Moral Consequences of Self-Actualization.” Philosophy East and West 50.2 (2000): 179–207. 57 Nishitani Keiji, “The I-Thou Relation in Zen Buddhism,” in Franck (ed.), The Buddha Eye 39–53, 40. 58 Nishitani, “The I-Thou Relation in Zen Buddhism,” 41. 59 On the underappreciated significance of the ethical dimension of Zen Buddhism, see Jin Y. Park, Buddhism and Postmodernity: Zen, Huayan, and the Possibility of Buddhist Postmodern Ethics (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2010); and Jin Y. Park “Ethics of Tension: A Buddhist-Postmodern Ethical Paradigm.” Taiwan Journal of East Asian Studies 10 (2013): 123–142. 60 Simon P. James, Zen Buddhism and Environmental Ethics (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2004). 61 Dōgen, Moon in a Dewdrop, 70. 62 Buber, Hasidism, 186. 63 Translation modified Buber, Hasidism, 186. 64 Yuan ren lun ॳҎ䂪, T45 N1886: 707c27, 708a02; Peter N. Gregory, Inquiry into the Origin of Humanity (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1995), 66. 65 T45 N1886: 710c24; Gregory, Inquiry into the Origin of Humanity, 1995, 206. 66 A. Charles Muller, Korea’s Great Buddhist-Confucian Debate: The Treatises of Chong Tojon (Sambong) and Hamho Tuktong (Kihwa) (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2015). On the philosophical character of this debate, see Nelson, “Suffering, Evil, and the Emotions,” 447–462.

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67 Gihwa, HBJ 7.223b15; Muller, Korea’s Great Buddhist-Confucian Debate, 104. On suffering and evil in the East Asian context, see Franklin Perkins, Heaven and Earth Are Not Humane: The Problem of Evil in Classical Chinese Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press; 2014).

Chapter 8 1

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3 4

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cong kong bei kong; T48 N2010 376b29. Note that some translations have been modified; in particular, transliterations have been updated from Wade-Giles to pinyin (e.g., “tao” has been changed to “dao”) except when they are included in the title of a text. Chinese terms are transliterated in pinyin except in bibliographical information of works using Wade-Giles. Some translations have been modified. For Chinese passages and phrases, a primary source is CBETA Chinese Electronic Tripitaka at http://www.cbeta.org/index.htm. The SAT Taisho shinshu daizokyo at http://21dzk.l.u-tokyo.ac.jp/SAT/index.html and the Digital Dictionary of Buddhism at http://www.buddhism-dict.net/ddb/ have also been consulted. Note that Taishō references are only added when Chinese text is used, and is cited by Taishō volume number, page number(s), column(s) (a, b, or c), and (if appropriate) line numbers. Huangbo, Essentials of the Transmission of Mind (Huangbo shan Duanji chanshi chuanxin fayao 咗ቅᮋ䱯⽾᏿‫ڇ‬ᖗ⊩㽕: T48 N2012A 380c02-c03; T48 N2012A: 381c15. Huangbo, T48 N2012A: 381c07; T48 N2012A: 381c01. See Albert Welter, The Linji lu and the Creation of Chan Orthodoxy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); John R. McRae, Seeing through Zen: Encounter, Transformation, and Genealogy in Chinese Chan Buddhism (Berkeley : University of California Press, 2003). Albert Welter, Monks, Rulers, and Literati: The Political Ascendency of Chan Buddhism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 4; Welter, The Linji lu and the Creation of Chan Orthodoxy, 82. McRae, Seeing through Zen, 90, 91. On Zongmi’s critical assessment of Hongzhou Chan’s conception of spontaneity from the perspective of karmic ethical causality, see Zongmi, Inquiry into the Origin of Humanity, trans. and ed. by Peter Gregory (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1995), 32, 33, 90–94, 203, 204; Jeff Broughton, “Tsung-mi’s Zen Prolegomenon: Introduction to an Exemplary Zen Canon,” in Steven Heine and Dale S. Wright (eds.), The Zen Canon: Understanding the Classic Texts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 25–27. On the fox gong’an, see Steven Heine, Opening a Mountain: Kōans of the Zen Masters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 130.

302 8

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11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

Notes Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights: An Epistemological Critique of the Chan Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 3, 78–80. Shin’ichi Hisamatsu, the Kyōto school philosopher, distinguished “absolute” or “Oriental” nothingness as a clearing (that is elucidated as emptying in this chapter) awareness from its negative Western interpretations as well as from mysticism understood as absorption and enthusiastic participation. He noted in his classic account of Zen nothingness: “The ekstasis or unio-mystica of Oriental Nothingness, however, is neither ’divine possession’ nor ‘a state of bewitchment.’ Rather, it must always be the NothingnessSamadhi of ‘thoroughly clear ever-present awareness,’ in which subject and object are not two.” See Shin’ichi Hisamatsu, “The Characteristics of Oriental Nothingness,” trans. Richard De Martino. Philosophical Studies of Japan 2 (1960): 65–97. Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights, 52–88; Welter, The Linji lu and the Creation of Chan Orthodoxy, 15–24. For a positive account of Nishida Kitaro and Ueda Shizuteru, which carefully distinguishes their approach to nothingness from Western mysticism and negative theology, see Robert E. Carter, “God and Nothingness.” Philosophy East and West 59.1 (Jan. 2009): 1–21. Including Lin Ma, Heidegger on East-West Dialogue: Anticipating the Event (New York: Routledge, 2008); Reinhard May, Heidegger’s Hidden Sources: East Asian Influences on his Work (London: Routledge, 1996); Hartmut Buchner (ed.), Japan und Heidegger (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke Verlag, 1989); Graham Parkes (ed.), Heidegger and Asian Thought (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1987). Compare Ma, Heidegger on East-West Dialogue, 183. Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1983), 96. Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, 96. Kōichi Tsujimura, “Martin Heideggers Denken und die Japanische Philosophie,” in Buchner, Japan und Heidegger, 165. Ta Hui (Dahui), Swampland Flowers, trans. J. C. Cleary (Boston: Shambhala, 2006), 57. Martin Heidegger, GA 27 Einleitung in die Philosophie (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 2001), 3. Heidegger citations are to the page numbers of the German editions except when noted. GA 27, 2, 3. GA 27, 4 and 6. GA 27, 11. GA 27, 12 GA 27, 331–338. GA 27, 191. T48 N2012A: 381a21-22; Huangbo, “Essentials of the Transmission of Mind,” trans. J. R. McRae, in Zen Texts (Berkeley: Numata Center, 2005), 21. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge, 1983), Proposition 7.

Notes 25 26 27 28 29 30

31

32 33

34 35 36 37 38

39 40

41 42 43

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Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 6.41–6.42. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 6.42–6.421. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 6.522. Rudolf Carnap, The Logical Structure of the World and Pseudoproblems in Philosophy (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1967), 297. Rudolf Carnap, Scheinprobleme in der Philosophie und andere metaphysikkritische Schriften (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2004), 81, 103. See Eric S. Nelson, “Dilthey and Carnap: The Feeling of Life, the Scientific Worldview, and Eliminating Metaphysics,” in Franz Leander Fillafer, Johannes Feichtinger, Jan Surman (eds.), The Worlds of Positivism : A Global Intellectual History (New York: Palgrave, 2017). Rudolf Carnap, “Überwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Analyse der Sprache,” in Carnap, Scheinprobleme in der Philosophie und andere metaphysikkritische Schriften, 81, 103. Carnap, “Überwindung der Metaphysik,” 95. Carnap, “Überwindung der Metaphysik,” 106, 107; On Dilthey’s importance for Carnap’s arguments, see G. Gabriel, “Introduction: Carnap Brought Home,” in S. Awodey and C. Klein (eds.), Carnap Brought Home: The View from Jena (Chicago: Open Court, 2004), 3–20. Compare Carter, “God and Nothingness,” 1–21. Martin Heidegger, Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 94. PM citations are to the pagination of the English translation. PM, 84. Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. G. Fried and R. Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 18–21. For example, in G. W. Leibniz, “On the Ultimate Origination of Things” (1697) in Leibniz, Philosophical Essays, trans. and ed. R. Ariew and D. Garber (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), 149. PM, 290. Leibniz, Philosophical Essays, 114. The analysis of finitude as imperfection, as privation and sin, contrasts with the perfection of things “just as they are” in Hongzhou Chan Buddhism. The constitutive character of the zero plays a significant role in Leibniz’s interpretation of the Yijing as a binary logic of 0 and 1. PM, 238. T51 N2076 0457c07. On the Western reception and interpretation of Buddhism as nihilism, see RogerPol Droit, The Cult of Nothingness: The Philosophers and the Buddha (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). Adopted from S. Addiss, S. Lombardo and J. Roitman (eds.), Zen Sourcebook: Traditional Documents from China, Korea, and Japan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2008), 9; The Blue Cliff Record, trans. T. Cleary and J. C. Cleary (Boston: Shambhala, 1992), 1.

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45 Welter, The Linji lu and the Creation of Chan Orthodoxy, 40, 98, 99. 46 Welter, The Linji lu and the Creation of Chan Orthodoxy, 48. 47 T48 N2008: 348a29-b02, Huineng, The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, trans. P. B. Yampolsky (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), 128. 48 Translation modified from Addiss, Lombardo, Roitman, Zen Sourcebook, 76. 49 May, Heidegger’s Hidden Sources, 32, 33. 50 The later sixteenth-century Korean master Seosan employed a number of expressions such as “just as it is,” “just like this” etc., see, for example, Boep Joeng’s edition of Seosan’s classic work, The Mirror of Zen (Boston: Shambhala, 2006), 99. 51 PM, 91. 52 PM, 86–88. 53 PM, 91. 54 Heidegger, GA 60 Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1995), 30–54. 55 GA 61, 2, 151–155. 56 GA 61, 103. 57 GA 61, 93. 58 GA 61, 189. 59 PM, 89. 60 PM, 92. 61 PM, 96. 62 Welter, The Linji lu and the Creation of Chan Orthodoxy, 132–133; Zongmi, Inquiry into the Origin of Humanity, 32, 33; P. N. Gregory, Tsung-Mi and the Sinification of Buddhism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); J. L. Broughton, Zongmi on Chan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). 63 Welter, The Linji lu and the Creation of Chan Orthodoxy, 2, 3. 64 Yuanwu, Zen Letters: Teachings of Yuanwu, trans. J. C. Cleary and T. Cleary (Boston: Shambhala, 1994), 106, 107. 65 On the difference between performative and referential utterances in Chan, see McRae, Seeing through Zen, 76. 66 Heidegger, Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans. M. Heim (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 2, 3. 67 Chenyang Li, The Tao Encounters the West (Albany : State University of New York Press, 1999), 57–59; PM, 142. 68 Heidegger, Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, 6. 69 PM, 286. 70 PM, 289. 71 See T. Griffith Foulk, “The Form and Function of Kōan Literature,” in Steven Heine and Dale S. Wright (eds.), The Kōan: Texts and Contexts in Zen Buddhism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 35. 72 Linji, Zen Teachings of Master Lin-Chi, trans. Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 52, 13.

Notes 73 74 75 76 77 78 79

305

Welter, The Linji lu and the Creation of Chan Orthodoxy, 89. Welter, The Linji lu and the Creation of Chan Orthodoxy, 148, 149. Welter, Monks, Rulers, and Literati, 120, 121, 165. McRae, Seeing through Zen, 92, 93, 132. Linji, Zen Teachings, 50. T47 N1985: 498c27; See Heine, Opening a Mountain, cases 13–15. See Zhenzhou Linji Huizhao chanshi yulu 䦂Ꮂ㞼△᜻✻⽾᏿䁲䣘, T47 N1985: 503b03-23, T47 N1985: 504b18-22, T47 N1985: 506c14-16; Heine, Opening a Mountain, cases 16 and 57. 80 PM, 3–4. 81 PM, 106–108. 82 PM, 71, 107–109, 284. 83 On the radical difference between faith and philosophy in Heidegger, note Heidegger, PM, 43–44; Compare Bodhidharma, The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma, trans. ed. and Red Pine (New York: North Point Press, 1987), 9–13. 84 Jinhua Jia, The Hongzhou School of Chan Buddhism (Albany : State University of New York Press, 2006), 71. 85 T48 N2010: 376b25; Seosan, The Mirror of Zen, 117. 86 Heidegger, Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, 106. 87 “Das eigentliches Sein des Daseins ist, was es ist, nur so, daß es das uneigentliche eigentlich ist, d.h. in sich ‘aufhebt.’ Es ist selbst nichts, was gleichsam für sich neben dem uneigentlichen bestehen sollte und könnte.” Martin Heidegger, GA 64 Der Begriff der Zeit (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 2004), 81. 88 T47 N1985: 497c19-20; Linji, Zen Teachings, 27. 89 Linji, Zen Teachings, 29, 31. 90 Linji, Zen Teachings, 76. 91 Welter, Monks, Rulers, and Literati, 18, 19. 92 Welter, The Linji lu and the Creation of Chan Orthodoxy, 32. 93 Welter, Monks, Rulers, and Literati, 67, 68, 79. 94 Dale S. Wright, Philosophical Meditations on Zen Buddhism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 95 Bernard Faure, The Will to Orthodoxy: A Critical Genealogy of Chan Buddhism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). 96 Bodhidharma, Zen Teaching, 111. 97 Huineng, The Platform Sutra, 141, 168. 98 Zongmi, Inquiry into the Origin of Humanity, 108, 161–175. 99 T48 N2012A: 383b02-13; Huangbo, “Essentials of the Transmission of Mind,” 37. 100 Seosan, The Mirror of Zen, 51, 64; Dahui, Swampland Flowers, 1. 101 T48 N2012A: 383b02-13; Huangbo, “Essentials of the Transmission of Mind,” 37. 102 PM, 134.

306

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103 Wright, Philosophical Meditations on Zen Buddhism, 33; also compare Dale S. Wright, “Rethinking Transcendence: The Role of Language in Zen Experience.” Philosophy East and West 42.1 (1992): 113–138. See Jin Y. Park, “Zen and Zen Philosophy of Language: A Soteriological Approach.” Dao 1.2 (2002): 209–228. 104 Dahui, Swampland Flowers, 120. 105 Dahui, Swampland Flowers, 120; D. T. Suzuki, The Zen Doctrine of No Mind (London: Rider, 1983), 138. 106 Bodhidharma, Zen Teaching, 77; Dahui, Swampland Flowers, 63. 107 Dahui, Swampland Flowers, 2, 3, 6; Yuanwu, Zen Letters, 46. 108 Dahui, Swampland Flowers, 34. 109 Yuanwu, Zen Letters, 99. 110 Yuanwu, Zen Letters, 32, 33, 38, 39. 111 Dahui, Swampland Flowers, 119. 112 Foulk, “The Form and Function of Kōan Literature,” 41. 113 Dahui, Swampland Flowers, 93. 114 Seosan, The Mirror of Zen, 110 and 14, 21. 115 Wright, Philosophical Meditations on Zen Buddhism, 199–202. 116 GA 60, 3. 117 On the historical context of Hongzhou Chan, see Jia, Hongzhou School, 67–82. 118 Mazu translated in Jia, Hongzhou School, 122. 119 Mazu translated in Jia, Hongzhou School, 123. 120 Mazu translated in Jia, Hongzhou School, 123. 121 R. F. Sasaki, Y. Iriya and D. R. Fraser, A Man of Zen: The Recorded Sayings of Layman P’ang (New York: Weatherhill, 1971), 46. 122 Sasaki et al., A Man of Zen, 46. 123 Dahui, Swampland Flowers, 118, 119. 124 Dahui, Swampland Flowers, 92; Yuanwu, Zen Letters, 70. 125 Dahui, Swampland Flowers, 32, 64. 126 Seosan, The Mirror of Zen, 24–25; Wright, Philosophical Meditations on Zen Buddhism, 97; on Dahui’s use of doubt as a way to awakening, see Morten Schlütter, How Zen Became Zen: The Dispute over Enlightenment and the Formation of Chan Buddhism in Song-Dynasty China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008), 109, 112. 127 Seosan, The Mirror of Zen, 30; Dahui, Swampland Flowers, 116; On Dahui’s use of the huatou, see Schlütter, How Zen Became Zen, 105–118. 128 Dahui, Swampland Flowers, 38, 10. 129 Dahui, Swampland Flowers, 33. 130 Dahui, Swampland Flowers, 42, 64, 77. 131 Dahui, Swampland Flowers, 65, 66. 132 Dahui, Swampland Flowers, 43. On Zhuangzian freedom in death, in contrast to Heidegger’s anxiety, compare David Chai, "On Pillowing One’s Skull: Zhuangzi and Heidegger on Death." Frontiers of Philosophy in China 11.3 (2016): 483–500.

Notes

307

133 Wright, Philosophical Meditations on Zen Buddhism, 85–91, 96–99. 134 Wright, Philosophical Meditations on Zen Buddhism, 97; Schlütter, How Zen Became Zen, 111, 165–166. 135 T48 N2008: 353a12, trans. in Huineng, The Platform Sutra, 138; compare Yuanwu, Zen Letters, 49. 136 Jia, Hongzhou School, 124. 137 Blue Cliff Record, 42. 138 Seosan, The Mirror of Zen, 43. 139 T51 N2076: 457c15. 140 Compare Zongmi, Inquiry into the Origin of Humanity, 13, 66, 67. 141 T48 N2008: 353a-b, Huineng, The Platform Sutra, 139. 142 Dahui, Swampland Flowers, 72. 143 T48 N2008: 351c09-10; Huineng, The Platform Sutra, 161. 144 T51 N2076: 458a08. 145 T48 N2008: 353a02-03, Huineng, The Platform Sutra, 136; Compare Seosan, The Mirror of Zen, 83. 146 you ji shi wu wu ji shi you. T48 N2010: 377a06-a07. 147 Linji, Zen Teachings, 70. 148 Seosan, The Mirror of Zen, 12. 149 Wright, Philosophical Meditations on Zen Buddhism, 200–202. 150 Youru Wang, Linguistic Strategies in Daoist Zhuangzi and Chan Buddhism: The Other Way of Speaking (London: Routledge, 2003). 151 Dahui, Swampland Flowers, 95. 152 Linji, Zen Teachings, 71. 153 Such as The Sutra of Complete Enlightenment (Boston: Shambhala, 1999), 56. 154 Huangbo, “Essentials of the Transmission of Mind,” 26, 27. 155 On the identification of the “more formal” and the “more empty,” see Heidegger, GA 61 Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1994), 33. 156 PM, 21. 157 PM, 135. 158 GA 61, 30; PM, 144. 159 PM: 236–237. 160 Respectively, GA 27, 180, 198–199, and GA 27, 214. 161 T51 N2076: 458a06. 162 Linji, Zen Teachings, 36, 25. 163 Huineng, The Platform Sutra, 149. 164 Dahui, Swampland Flowers, 46. 165 Huineng, The Platform Sutra, 166, 172. 166 Linji, Zen Teachings, 26. 167 Dahui, Swampland Flowers, 116; Yuanwu, Zen Letters, 49.

308

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168 Tsujimura, 1989, 165; Hee-Jin Kim, Eihei Dōgen: Mystical Realist (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2004), 202; Dōgen, Moon in a Dewdrop: Writings of Zen Master Dōgen, ed. Kazuaki Tanahashi (New York: North Point Press, 1995), 98, 102. 169 Krzysztof Ziarek, Language after Heidegger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 85. 170 Compare Heidegger, GA 66 Besinnung (1938/39) (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1997), 139, 200, 203; Heidegger, GA 69 Die Geschichte des Seyns (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1998), 53. On the difference between hint and trace, see Krzysztof Ziarek, “Whose Other, Which Alterity? The Human after Humanism,” in J. E. Drabinski and E. S. Nelson (eds.), Between Levinas and Heidegger (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014), 238. 171 For instance, see GA 66, 403; Heidegger, GA 71 Das Ereignis (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 2009), 260–261; GA 74 Zum Wesen der Sprache und Zur Frage nach der Kunst (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 2010), 29, 93.

Conclusion 1

2 3 4

5

6

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Everywhere and Nowhere,” in Merleau-Ponty, Signs (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 126–159.MerleauPonty proposed here that: “Western philosophy can learn from [non-Western philosophies] to rediscover the relationship to being and the initial option which gave it birth, and to estimate the possibilities we have shut ourselves off from in becoming ‘Westerners’, and perhaps reopen them” (133). On Merleau-Ponty’s reception of and relation with Asian philosophy, see the introduction by Jin Y. Park and Gereon Kopf (eds.). Merleau-Ponty and Buddhism (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2009), 1–13. Merleau-Ponty, “Everywhere and Nowhere,” 127. Merleau-Ponty, “Everywhere and Nowhere,” 133. Dilthey utilizes words such as Auseinandersetzung, Streit, and Widerstreit to express the dynamic and plural relations that constitute social-political life in his works. See Eric S. Nelson, “The World Picture and Its Conflict in Dilthey and Heidegger.” Humana.Mente: Journal of Philosophical Studies 18 (2011): 19–38. Wilhelm Dilthey, Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften: Versuch einer Grundlegung für das Studium der Gesellschaft und der Geschichte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1956), 402; translation: Wilhelm Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 235. On the philosophical significance of reflective judgment in Kant and reflection in Dilthey, see Rudolf A. Makkreel, Imagination and Interpretation in Kant (Chicago; University of Chicago Press, 1990); Rudolf Makkreel, Dilthey: Philosopher of the Human Studies. 2nd edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).

Notes 7 8 9

10 11

12

13

14

15

16

309

Rudolf A. Makkreel, Orientation and Judgment in Hermeneutics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). Makkreel, Orientation and Judgment in Hermeneutics, 52. The classic formulation of Orientalism, and a significant account of how it operates through negative and affirmative appropriating discourses, can be found in Edward W. Said, Orientalism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985). Martin Heidegger, “From a Dialogue on Language,” in Heidegger, On the Way to Language (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 1–56. Compare Rodolphe Gasché, Europe, or the Infinite Task: A Study of a Philosophical Concept (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009); Philippe Nemo, What Is the West? (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2006). Another contemporary example might be Terry Pinkard’s endeavor to reconstruct and defend Hegel’s philosophy of history and its privileging of Western modernity as a unique realization of human subjectivity, freedom, and justice in Does History Make Sense?: Hegel on the Historical Shapes of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017). On the continuing ethnocentrism of contemporary academic Western philosophy, see Bryan W. Van Norden, Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). Dongming Zhao traces how the learning of the heart-mind (xinxue ᖗᅌ) articulated by Lu Xiangshan (䱌䈵ቅ) and Wang Yangming (⥟䱑ᯢ) operates as a discourse of the infinite performatively enacting and embodying irreducibly ethical principles (tianli ໽⧚), see his article “Neo-Confucian Theory of Mind as a Discourse of the Infinite: The Lu-Wang School.” Frontiers of Philosophy in China 10.1 (2015): 75–94. Georg Misch, Der Weg in die Philosophie (Leipzig: Teubner, 1926), 13; Georg Misch, The Dawn of Philosophy: A Philosophical Primer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951), 1, 12. On the context and import of this poem, see Siegfried Unseld, Goethe and the Ginkgo: A Tree and a Poem, trans. Kenneth J Northcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). For the German and English versions of the poem, see Johann W. Goethe, Werke: Gedichte und Epen II, Vol. 2 (Hamburg: Wegner, 2005), 66; Johann W. Goethe, Poems of the West and the East: West-eastern Divan = West-östlicher Divan: Bilingual Edition of the Complete Poems (Bern: P. Lang, 1998), 260, 261. Note that the English translation has been modified to emphasize the role of Sinn (that is, sense, meaning) in the poem. For the Chinese translation, see Gede ℠ᖋ [Johann Wolfgang von Goethe], tr. Yang Wuneng ἞℺㛑, Gede shuqing shi xuancui ℠ᖋᡦᚙ䀽䙌㧗 (Selection of Goethe’s Lyric Poetry) (Chengdu: Sichuan renmin chubanshe, 2009), 120.

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Index Note: The letter “n” following locators refers to notes. Adorno, Theodor W. 76, 204–7, 215, 296 n.7 affect affective language 9, 116, 128 ethical affect 53, 87, 94, 98, 101, 106, 145 reactive affect 77–8, 82, 85, 88–92, 96–7, 105 Alexander the Great 28, 84 Al-Kindī, Abu Yūsuf Ya‘qūb ibn ’Isḥāq aṣṢabbāḥ 1, 4–5 alterity 60, 82–3, 88, 93, 96, 141, 155, 161, 181, 198, 206, 258 Americanism 45, 192–3, 195 Ammon, Otto 28 Analects (Lunyu 䂪䁲) 8, 13, 15, 19, 37–9, 41, 47, 66–7, 73, 87–101, 103, 106–7, 145 and moral psychology 87–101, 103, 106–7 animal 68, 116, 125, 220, 224 anti-Semitism 24–5, 61–2, 64, 214 Arendt, Hannah 38 Aristotle 59, 131, 189 Ast, Friedrich 13, 21 asymmetry asymmetrical ethics 8, 17, 83, 88–9, 92–3, 96–101, 104, 106–8, 163, 186, 226 asymmetrical power relations 5, 40, 43, 46, 64, 108, 265 n.46 atheism 16, 19, 37, 50, 63, 112–14, 145, 166–7, 239 Augustine 231 autobiography/biography viii, 31–2, 131–3, 147, 215, 282 n.1 autonomy 16, 29, 35–6, 52, 54, 76, 101, 166–7, 170–1, 176, 179, 238 Baeck, Leo 68 Baizhang (ⱒϜ) 226, 234 Barth, Karl 37

beginning 31, 132–3, 137–8, 142–7, 151–3, 155–6, 192–4, 203. See also origin beginning of philosophy 31, 132–3, 144, 146, 193–4 first and other beginning (der erste und der andere Anfang) 137–8, 142, 155, 192–4, 203 Bell, Daniel 208 Bell, Daniel A. 107 Bellow, Saul 5, 262 n.11 Benjamin, Walter 26 Berdyaev, Nikolai 68 Bergson, Henri 7, 49, 51–2, 55, 69–70, 72–3 Besinnung (contemplation, reflection, thoughtfulness) 140, 146, 148, 254 Bhikkhu Maha Mani 175, 195 Bilfinger, Georg Bernhard 16, 19 Bodhidharma (㦽ᦤ䘨ᨽ) 234, 241 body/embodiment 30, 73, 153, 155, 162–3, 209, 238, 245 Bolshevism. See communism Bonaparte, Napoleon 84 Book of Odes (Shijing 䀽㍧) 102 Book of Rites (Liji ⾂㿬) 102 Brecht, Bertolt 26, 66 Brentano, Franz 60, 161 Buber, Martin 3, 7–10, 14–16, 26, 33, 35–7, 39–41, 47, 66, 109–11, 113–21, 124–9, 138, 145, 170, 201–3, 209–20, 224 and the Buddha 212 and Chan/Zen Buddhism 201–3, 209–20, 224 and Confucianism 35–7, 39–41, 145 and contact 120, 184, 214, 217 and Daoism 109–11, 113–21, 124–9 and Hasidism 9–10, 115–17, 127–8, 203, 209–10, 212–14, 216, 298 n.29 and I-Thou (ich–Du) 37, 202, 210–12, 216–19, 221 and parable 9, 116, 119, 125, 127–8

Index and teaching (Lehre) 9, 115–17, 125, 127, 209 and Zionism 214, 299 n.44 Buddha (Siddhārtha Gautama) 1, 28, 32, 34, 39, 48, 59, 85, 142, 165–70, 172–3, 175, 182, 190, 211–12 Buddhism 4–6, 9–10, 23, 25, 46, 48–9, 63, 72, 74, 81, 85, 94, 99, 112, 114, 150, 159–60, 162, 164–70, 172–6, 179, 187–9, 196, 211, 217, 234. See also Chan/Zen Buddhism Madhyamaka 211, 234 Yogācāra 162 Caesar, Julius 28 Cairns, Dorion 172–3, 184 capitalism 23, 29, 54, 59, 76, 207 Carnap, Rudolf 56, 229–32, 235, 237, 252 and nothing 229–32, 235, 237, 252 Chamberlain, Houston Stewart 28 Chan/Zen (⽾) Buddhism 10–11, 34, 69, 114, 127, 134, 136, 156–7, 175, 197, 201–10, 212, 215–28, 232–4, 236–52. See also Buddhism as antinomian 221–3, 226, 232, 236 and desacralization 233–4, 238–9, 244 and emptiness 202, 211–13, 217, 222–3, 225, 227–8, 232–5, 238–52 as ethos 218–24 and gong’an/kōan ݀Ḝ) 219, 226, 234–5, 239, 243, 245 and Hongzhou lineage (⋾Ꮂᅫ) 217, 222–3, 226, 233–4, 236, 239–40, 243, 247, 250 and paradox 10–11, 202, 207, 216, 234, 237, 242, 244–5, 250 as performative 223, 237–8, 241–2 Chang, Carsun. See Zhang, Junmai Cheng, Chung-ying (៤Ё㣅) 151 Chinese Communist Party (CCP, Zhongguo gongchandang Ё೟݅⫶ 咼) 57, 71 Chinese language 22, 26, 62–3, 152 Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT, Zhongguo guomindang Ё೟೟⇥ 咼) 57, 71 Christianity 15, 18, 20–3, 25, 27–8, 35, 37, 49–50, 54, 63, 65, 80–1, 84–5, 140–1, 149–50, 165, 168, 173–4, 182, 196, 209–11, 213–14, 221, 231, 233–4, 241

337

Classic of Familial Reverence (Xiaojing ᄱ ㍧) 101 “coldness” 22, 26, 28 colonialism 5–6, 13, 29, 40, 43–6, 53, 58–60, 181–2, 207 and cosmopolitanism 45–6, 181 communism 30, 52, 57, 60, 71, 76, 136, 206, 213, 299 n.41 community 20, 31, 39, 53, 62, 65, 67, 94, 125, 150, 185, 214–15, 255 conceptual thinking 5–6, 22, 34, 137, 152, 225, 253 Confucianism (rujia ‫ۦ‬ᆊ) 4, 6–8, 13–20, 22–41, 43–50, 52–5, 61, 63–5, 67–77, 81, 83, 87–108, 112–14, 116, 119–20, 132, 144–6, 148–51, 159, 166, 202, 216, 218, 222, 224, 258 and de (ᖋ, virtue, justice) 45, 47 and junzi (৯ᄤ, exemplary or noble person) 8, 17, 88–9, 91, 95–7, 99, 104, 106 and li (⾂, ritual, ritual propriety) 8, 17, 45, 75, 89, 102 and ren (ҕ, benevolence, humaneness) 8, 17, 37–9, 72, 81, 89, 91, 93–5, 97, 100, 224 and shu (ᘩ, reciprocity, mutuality) 17, 40, 89, 98, 104 and xiaoren (ᇣҎ, ignoble/petty person) 88, 93, 95–7, 99 and yuan (ᗼ, resent) 92, 94–5, 97, 99–100, 103 Confucius (Kongzi ᄨᄤ) 7, 9, 13–19, 22, 24–33, 36–9, 43, 65–6, 71–5, 84–6, 88, 92, 94–7, 100, 102–3, 105–6, 112–13, 138, 144–5, 150, 166 as “Chinese Socrates” 27, 75 cosmopolitanism 2, 4, 28–9, 44–6, 57–8, 62, 65, 69, 107, 164, 170, 180–1, 183, 185–6, 191, 214 crisis 33, 44–5, 48, 54, 170–1, 177–8, 182, 186–7 critique critical exemplary model 1, 29, 41, 90, 99, 254 critique of the Eurocentric conception of reason 3, 11, 43, 131, 257–9 cultivation 8, 17, 29–30, 32, 47, 53, 72, 88–9, 97–104, 129, 132, 145, 149, 220–2

338

Index

Dahui (໻᜻) 228, 243–6 Daodejing (䘧ᖋ㍧) 36, 110–11, 113–17, 120–3, 125, 134, 149, 266 n.60 Daoism (daojia 䘧ᆊ) 3–4, 6, 8–10, 23, 34, 36, 46, 63, 67, 70, 81, 99, 110–29, 134, 136, 149–51, 156–7, 159–60, 174–5, 195, 202–3, 205, 209–12, 214–16, 218, 222, 224, 226–7, 235, 251–2 as “atheistic” and “materialist” 111–14 and daojiao (䘧ᬢ, “Daoism”) 115 and wuwei (⛵⠆, non–action, non– coercive letting) 117–20, 125, 136, 202, 251 and ziran (㞾✊, nature, spontaneity) 125 Darwin, Charles 52 Darwinism 56, 59–60 de Beauvoir, Simone 3 Deism 16, 18, 113 democracy 25, 45, 54–5, 57, 70–1, 74, 81 social democracy 25, 55, 57, 70–1 Dennett, Daniel 160 Derrida, Jacques 34, 43, 135, 137–8, 140, 156, 190–1, 195, 204 Descartes, René 51, 161, 170–1, 173, 253 Dewey, John 55–6, 171–2, 206–7 Diderot, Denis 27 Dilthey, Wilhelm 9, 15, 30–3, 79, 125, 132–3, 138–41, 146, 148–50, 156–7, 213, 231, 254–5 and worldview 125, 138–40, 148–9, 254–5 Ding Wenjiang (ϕ᭛∳) 69–70, 72, 272 n.101 Diotima of Mantinea 199 Dōgen (䘧‫ )ܗ‬5, 218, 220–1, 250 Driesch, Hans 7, 16, 33, 44, 47, 50, 55–70, 76, 87, 170, 180, 185–6, 259 and China 55–70 and criticism of anti–Semitism 61–4 and critique of racial theory 57–62 and “good European” (gute Europäer) 63–4, 180 and opposition to National Socialism 57–61 Driesch, Margarete 56–7, 59–60, 62

Einstein, Albert 28, 56, 73, 171 Eizik, Rabbi 215–16 emptiness 3, 10–11, 114, 122–3, 125, 134, 157, 160, 165, 174–5, 202, 211–13, 217, 222–3, 225, 227–8, 232–5, 238–52, 257. See also nothingness as emptying 10, 211, 222–3, 235, 238, 240, 242–3, 247–9, 251, 284 n.29, 302 n.8 Enlightenment 14–15, 27–8, 32, 34, 43, 45, 54–5, 71–2, 144–5, 166–7, 169, 177, 187 Epicurus 113 equality 25, 54, 71, 79–80, 83–5, 96, 108, 149 ethical life (Sittlichkeit) 29, 77–9, 86, 100, 257 ethnocentrism 2–5, 13, 40, 61, 68, 107, 141–3, 151, 156, 180–1, 184, 186, 188, 190, 199, 212, 259 ethos 16, 23, 25, 29, 37–8, 81, 102, 116, 127, 165–6, 171, 201, 206–7, 218–24 Eucken, Rudolf 7, 16, 33, 44, 47–55, 57–8, 65, 69–73, 76, 79, 81, 101, 105 and activist Idealism 47–51 and spiritual life 47, 52, 54 Eurocentrism 3, 5, 11, 13, 18, 43, 110, 129, 138, 140, 145, 160, 164, 176, 179–86, 190–1, 199, 202, 207, 213, 252, 257–9 exoticism 21, 205, 213, 215, 296 n.7

Eckhart, Meister 251 Ehrenfels, Christian von 60

Gadamer, Hans-Georg 67, 131, 255 Gihwa (Ꮕ੠) 1–2, 5, 222, 224

facticity 79–80, 131–3, 161–2, 179, 199, 248–9 feeling of life (Lebensgefühl) 115, 143, 157, 231, 254 Fenollosa, Ernest 26 Feuerbach, Ludwig 37 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 48, 64 Fingarette, Herbert 15 Fink, Eugen 172–4 first-person perspective 77–8, 82, 94, 133, 160–2, 275 n.2 Flanagan, Owen 94, 106, 275 n.2 Freud, Sigmund 178, 208 Fromm, Erich 207–8

Index Giles, Herbert Allen 114 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 28, 59, 67, 259–60 “good European” (gute Europäer) 63–4, 180, 190 Great Learning (Daxue ໻ᅌ) 41, 97 Gu Jiegang (主䷵࠯) 45 Habermas, Jürgen 3, 43, 51, 83, 185–7, 206, 255, 257–8 Haeckel, Ernst 62 Hallo, Rudolf 182 Hammerdörfer, Karl 113 Hasidism 9–10, 115–17, 127–8, 203, 209–10, 212–14, 216, 298 n.29 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 2–5, 7, 13, 15–16, 19–22, 24, 27, 31, 33–4, 38, 41, 48, 52–3, 55, 64, 86, 90, 109, 111, 113, 135, 137, 141, 143–4, 146–7, 151–3, 156, 160, 165, 182, 187, 191, 201, 203, 212–13, 253, 255, 257, 259 Heidegger, Martin 3, 6, 8–11, 17, 33–4, 38–9, 43, 50, 60, 69, 109–11, 114, 118, 121–9, 131–41, 143–8, 151, 153–7, 159–60, 162–4, 170, 174–6, 179–80, 187–8, 191–9, 201–5, 209, 212, 214–15, 223, 225, 227–40, 242–52, 256 and “Asiatic” 60, 135–7 and being (Sein) 122–3, 133, 139–40, 145, 157, 163, 175, 191–2, 225, 228, 251 and decision (Entscheidung) 135, 139, 175, 191, 194 and enframing (Ge-stell) 126, 136, 144, 203 and event (Ereignis) 133, 140, 146, 157, 197, 228, 250, 252 and formal indication (formale Anzeige) 10, 140, 248–51 and the fourfold (Geviert) 123, 129, 192 and iki (ǙǢ) 196–7 and Japan 10, 134, 159, 196–8, 203–4, 252, 256 and letting, release (Gelassenheit) 122, 124–5, 136, 163, 248–9, 251 and ontological difference 122–3, 139–40, 153

339

and people (Volk) 134–5, 148, 192–4 and poetic thinking 124, 127, 129, 137, 141–2, 195 Heraclitus 18, 253 hermeneutical situation 29, 32, 40, 138, 140, 147, 151, 234, 252 hermeneutics 1, 6, 9, 11, 18, 21, 25–6, 29– 30, 32–3, 40–1, 47, 65, 82, 109–10, 131–2, 138–42, 144, 146–7, 149–54, 157, 159, 163, 179, 184, 186, 198–9, 201–2, 212–13, 215, 219, 224, 227, 234, 252, 255–6, 258–9 intercultural hermeneutics 1, 9, 18, 25–6, 30, 32, 40–1, 65, 144, 151, 159, 184, 198–9, 201–2, 215, 224, 252, 256, 258 Herrigel, Eugen 69, 208, 297 n.21 Hess, Moses 299 n.43 hierarchy 22, 36, 58, 83, 106, 212, 257 Hinduism 23, 64–5, 150, 207, 210, 216 Hisamatsu Shin’ichi (Йᵒⳳϔ) 302 n.8 history Chinese history 19, 21, 36 historicity (Geschichtlichkeit) 131, 133, 139, 156, 181 historiography 21, 133, 139–40, 226–7 history of spirit 21–5, 180, 193, 214 philosophy of history 21, 38, 132–3, 137, 141, 144, 146, 176, 178, 180, 182–7, 191, 213, 249, 252, 257 Hitler, Adolf 68 Hölderlin, Friedrich 123, 135–6, 192 holy 122, 218, 244 Hongren (ᓬᖡ) 234 Honneth, Axel 83 Hook, Sidney 202, 207–8 Horkheimer, Max 49, 53 Hsiao Shih-yi. See Xiao Shiyi 㭁᏿↙ Huangbo (咘) 229, 234, 241, 243, 245, 247 Huineng (ᚴ㛑) 223, 245–7 Hu Shi (㚵䘽) 45, 66, 69 Husserl, Edmund 2, 9–10, 34, 38, 43, 51, 72, 135, 140, 159–64, 167–73, 175–91, 194–6, 198–9, 202, 257–8 and the Buddha 167–71 and crisis 170–1, 177–8, 182, 186–7 and epochè (reduction) 161, 172–4 and Europe and Eurocentrism 164, 176, 179–86, 190–1, 199

340

Index

and intentionality 161–2, 173 and Japan 164, 171–2, 179, 181 and Papuan 181, 183, 187 and renewal 164, 168, 170–2, 179, 183, 194 and Socrates 167, 169–71, 198–9 and transcendental 161–4, 167–70, 172–3, 188, 191 iconoclasm 30 45, 55, 226, 234, 238 and Chan/Zen Buddhism 226, 234, 238 and May Fourth Movement 30, 45, 55 idealism 7–8, 21, 24, 35, 44, 48–9, 51, 53, 55–7, 64, 67, 69–71, 76, 160–1, 166 activist idealism 44, 48, 51, 53, 71 German idealism 24, 49, 51, 55, 64, 67, 69–70, 76 transcendental idealism 160–1 imagistic and pictorial thinking 22, 152–4 imperialism 59 India 4, 6, 9, 20, 23–4, 26, 31, 34, 38, 54, 64–5, 68, 71, 85, 112, 133–4, 140–1, 143–4, 148, 150, 157, 167–8, 172–3, 175–6, 180–2, 187–9, 194–5, 206–7, 210, 213, 216–17, 228 Indian philosophy 134, 150, 167–8, 172, 176, 188 ineffability 116, 141, 198 intertextuality 1–3, 5–6, 8, 41, 74, 110, 121, 126, 145, 165, 197, 199, 225, 227, 231, 256, 258 intuition 10, 44, 46, 59, 74–6, 147, 226–8, 242 Islam 4, 19–20, 23–4, 26, 31, 63, 65, 187, 189 James, William 51–2 Jaspers, Karl 7, 16, 31–2, 37–40, 112, 167 and “axial age” (Achsenzeit) 31, 37 and Buddhism 167 and Confucianism 37–40, 267 n.68 and Daoism 112 and the encompassing (das Umgreifende) 38–9 Jeong Dojeon (䜁䘧‫ )ڇ‬222 Jesus 15–16, 28, 32, 38–9 Jiang Baili (㫷ⱒ䞠) 47 Jia Yi (䊜䂐) 94 Judaism 10, 24–5, 115–17, 201, 203, 209–10, 213–16

Jugendstil (Art Nouveau) 66 Jung, Carl 44, 64, 66, 68, 207–8, 225, 237 and Weimar era reception of Chinese thought 44, 64, 66, 68 and Zen Buddhism 207–8, 225, 237 Justi, Heinrich Gottlob 14, 16, 19 justice 41, 47, 78, 90, 92, 97, 211, 258 Kafka, Franz 26 Kaizō (ᬍ䗴, Renewal) 163, 171–2, 176–7 Kant, Immanuel 5, 7, 16, 19–21, 27, 41, 44, 48, 52, 54–6, 65–7, 70–6, 79, 94, 109, 111–13, 133, 160–1, 166, 170, 172, 190, 217, 254–5 Keyserling, Hermann Graf 44, 57, 64, 66, 68–9, 110, 170, 186 Kierkegaard, Søren Aabye 80 King Hui of Liang (Liang Hui Wang ṕᚴ ⥟) 34,106 Klages, Ludwig 48 Klemm, Gustav Friedrich 28 Koestler, Arthur 60, 202, 206–8, 218 Köppen, Karl Friedrich 166 Kristeva, Julia 3, 261 n.4 Kroll, Frank-Lothar 69 Kuki Shūzō (б儐਼䗴) 196–7 Kyōto School (Kyōto–gakuha Ҁ䛑ᅌ⌒) 176, 211, 219, 227 Laozi (㗕ᄤ) 8, 29, 37, 39, 63, 81, 110–13, 115, 117, 119–20, 123–4, 126–7, 211, 253 Layman Pang (Pang Yun 啤㯞) 244 League for Human Rights (Liga für Menschenrechte) 58, 67 legalism (fajia ⊩ᆊ) 149–50 Legge, James 114 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 7, 14–16, 19, 50, 59, 62, 65, 109–11, 141, 145, 201–2, 213, 232–3 and “exchange of light” 14, 65, 170, 202 and the nothing 232–3, 303 n.40 Lessing, Theodor 44, 58, 66–7, 110, 170 “levelling” 20, 25–6, 85, 124 Levinas, Emmanuel 26, 60, 138, 156, 163–4, 180, 195, 209, 213, 215, 248, 284 n.22 and “yellow peril” 60, 180, 213 Liang Qichao (ṕଳ䍙) 47, 55 Liang Shuming (ṕ┅⑳) 54

Index Liezi (߫ᄤ) 117 life-philosophy (Lebensphilosophie; shengming zhexue ⫳ੑ૆ᅌ) 7, 33, 44–5, 47–52, 55–6, 70–2, 74, 132, 138, 140, 142, 144, 150, 230, 236 lifeworld (Lebenswelt) 43, 51, 73, 86–7, 93–4, 102, 162, 171, 178–80, 183–7, 190, 194, 255–8 decolonizing and pluralizing the lifeworld 43, 180, 184, 187, 257 Linji (㞼△) 223, 226, 234, 236, 238–40, 245, 247–50 and “killing the Buddha” (feng fo sha fo 䗶ԯ↎ԯ) 223, 238, 245 Logos (λόγος) 124, 134–5, 141, 160, 190, 197 Lu Xiangshan (䱌䈵ቅ) 73 Lu Xun (元䖙) 82, 87 Macfie, Alexander Lyon 263 n.12 Mach, Ernst 166 Makkreel, Rudolf A. 255–6 Malebranche, Nicolas 15, 26, 111, 141 Mañjuśrī 238 Manu 84 Marcuse, Herbert 204–7 Marx, Karl 17, 76, 109, 208 Marxism 57, 208 Massis, Henri 60, 206 material force (qi ⇷) 27 May, Reinhard 129, 235 May Fourth Movement (wusi yundong Ѩ ಯ䘟ࢩ) 30, 45, 55, 70 Mazu Daoyi (侀⼪䘧ϔ) 218, 222–3, 233–4, 240, 244, 246–7 Meiners, Christoph 20, 86, 263 n.13 Meinong, Alexius 60 Mencius (Mengzi ᄳᄤ) 34, 53, 91, 99–100, 106–7 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 4, 162–4, 253, 259, 308 n.1 Minzhu pinglun ⇥Џ䀩䂪 (Democratic Review) 74 Misch, Georg 7, 9, 14, 16, 25–6, 30–5, 38, 40–1, 47, 50, 66, 110–11, 132, 138– 51, 156–7, 159, 169, 183, 185–6, 188–90, 201, 230, 254, 257–8 and biography 31, 132, 147 and breakthrough (Durchbruch) 34, 142, 169, 189–90, 258

341

and the Buddha 34, 169 and Confucianism 30–4 and Zhuangzi 142–3, 149–51 modernity 2, 8, 21, 23, 25, 43–5, 47–8, 55, 70, 118, 126–9, 136, 191–2, 203–4 Mohamed 32 Mohism (Mojia ๼ᆊ) 149–50 monotheism 24–5, 84, 114, 145, 210–11, 213 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat 3, 19, 26, 263 n.12 mood 116, 125, 128, 157, 235 moral personality 16, 30, 88, 111, 114, 143–4, 148–9 moral psychology 8, 77, 79, 89, 94, 96–7, 99 Morris, Charles W. 206–7 Mou Zongsan (⠳ᅫϝ) 74–6 Mozi (๼ᄤ) 100, 104, 106 Müller, Friedrich Max 166 mystical 5, 9–10, 46, 50, 63, 111–13, 115–17, 120, 127, 137, 145, 147, 149–50, 162, 178, 205–7, 209–11, 214–16, 221, 224, 226–8, 230, 241–2, 249, 251 mythical 27, 38, 113, 137, 183, 188–9, 239 Nāgārjuna 4–5, 40, 240 nationalism 46, 55, 57, 61, 63–5, 68, 71, 107, 213, 255, 259 National Socialism 35, 57–9, 61, 68–9, 120, 135, 171, 177–8, 191–3 naturalism 26, 52, 79, 112, 115, 126, 150, 167–8, 170, 177–80, 183, 189–90 Neo-Confucianism (songming lixue ᅟᯢ ⧚ᅌ) 5, 7–8, 14, 27, 70–1, 74–5, 104, 112, 151, 222, 257 Neo-Kantianism 55, 73, 79, 230 Neo-Platonism 149, 231 Neumann, Eugen 168, 174 Neurath, Otto 15, 29 New Confucianism (xin rujia ᮄ‫ۦ‬ᆊ) 44, 54–5, 74, 76, 106, 258 New Culture Movement (xin wenhua yundong ᮄ᭛࣪䘟ࢩ) 30, 44 New Sensation School (xin ganjue pai ᮄ ᛳ㾎⌒) 44 Newton, Isaac 28 Nietzsche, Friedrich 8, 16, 25–6, 51, 63, 77, 79–88, 90, 93, 95–6, 98–109,

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165–6, 173–5, 178, 180, 190, 208, 227, 234 and Buddhism 165–6, 173–5 and China 25, 83–6 and ressentiment 79–83, 85–8, 90, 100–1, 107–8 nihilism 117, 164–5, 174–5, 202, 232–4, 241, 248 nirvana 114, 166, 211, 232, 240 Nishi Amane (㽓਼) 4 Nishida Kitarō (㽓⬄ᑒ໮䚢) 219 Nishitani Keiji (㽓䈋ଧ⊏) 211–12, 219, 227 nothingness 10–11, 112–14, 122–3, 165–6, 174–5, 198, 209, 211–12, 217, 225, 227–37, 239, 241–2, 244–5, 247–52, 257, 302 n.8. also compare emptiness “absolute nothing” 211, 229, 235, 244 “oriental nothingness” 227, 302 n.8 ontotheology 4, 9, 112, 138, 164, 217, 232, 236, 241 Oriental despotism 3, 19–20, 22, 35, 84, 86, 263 n.9, 263 n.12, 263 n.13 Orientalism 19, 25–6, 29–30, 50, 64, 66, 195, 214, 256, 263 n.12 and Orientalist “feminization” 19, 25, 263 n.12 origin 6, 9, 33, 133, 135–6, 138–9, 143, 145–6, 148, 157, 169, 186–8, 198. See also beginning paganism 9, 25, 36–7, 114, 164, 214 pantheism 15, 18–19, 63, 112, 114, 166. See also Spinozism Park, Jin Y. 242, 265 n.46 Parmenides 153, 231 patterning principle (li ⧚) 27 people (min ⇥; Volk) 24–5, 45–6, 58–9, 61–2, 64, 76, 85–7, 112, 134–5, 138, 144, 148, 180–2, 192–4, 212, 214, 216, 263 n.13 personalism 47, 105, 114–15, 124, 132, 146, 210, 212, 217 phenomenology 9, 67, 140, 159–64, 171, 173, 175–6, 178, 180, 184, 186, 190, 197, 199, 230 philosophy concept/idea of philosophy 2, 6, 9, 13, 16, 32–4, 139–40, 156, 173, 183, 185, 189–90, 197, 201, 258

intercultural philosophy 1, 4–5, 9, 14, 31, 50–1, 65, 109–10, 156, 159–60, 186, 191, 198, 254, 257 origin/s of philosophy 6, 9, 33, 133, 135–9, 143, 145–6, 148, 157, 169, 186, 188, 198 Physis (φύσις) 132, 137, 147–8, 150, 250 piety 28–9, 115, 182, 209 Plato 5, 27, 84, 143, 167, 198 Plessner, Helmuth 7, 16, 35, 128, 138–40, 142, 156 Ploetz, Alfred 28 plurality 9, 33–4, 37, 43, 124, 140, 146, 156, 183–5, 190, 254 poetic 8–9, 28, 115–16, 123–9, 137, 142, 195, 242, 244, 250 Popper, Karl 28 Popper-Lynkeus, Josef 7, 15–16, 28–9, 40, 61, 84 and Confucian human piety 28–9 positivism 51–2, 54, 69, 146, 231–3, 236, 241 Pound, Ezra 26 Practicing the Mean (Zhongyong Ёᒌ) 41 pragmatism 45, 69, 72, 206–7 Puhua (᱂࣪) 239 Pu Songling (㪆ᵒ唵) 115–16 Quinet, Edgar 165 Qu Shiying (ⶓϪ㣅) 56, 66 race 3, 5, 20, 24, 28, 40, 57–62, 69, 141, 159, 178, 180–1, 184–5, 213 rationality communicative rationality 185–7, 257–8 crisis of reason 33, 54, 170–1, 177–80, 183, 187, 257 European and Eurocentric rationality 2–3, 6, 11, 22, 43, 51, 59, 137, 145, 169–70, 176–9, 183–5, 186–7, 191, 201, 207–8, 257–9 finitude of reason 19, 67 holistic and situated rationalities 32, 51, 59, 73, 128, 145, 154, 185–7, 208, 258 instrumental rationality 8–9, 24, 50–1, 98, 104, 119–21, 124, 126–7, 129, 132, 187, 220

Index non-Western and intercultural rationalities 23, 38, 43, 48, 51, 56, 59, 72, 74–5, 145, 169–70, 183–4, 257–9 redemption 23, 31, 48, 165, 167–8, 172, 174 relativism 41, 139, 141, 151, 254, 258 Renan, Ernest 165 renewal 45, 48–50, 68, 70, 155, 159, 164, 168, 170–2, 179, 183, 194, 204 resentment 8, 36, 77–9, 81–92, 94–100, 102–8, 165 Ressentiment 79–83, 85–8, 90, 100–1, 107–8 Rickert, Heinrich 76, 171 Rorty, Richard 34, 135, 137–8, 140, 156, 195, 204 Rosenzweig, Franz 7, 15–16, 24–6, 28, 31, 36–7, 111, 113–14, 137–8, 145, 182, 210–15, 217, 232 Rushd, Ibn (Averroes) 3, 5 Russell, Bertrand 35, 55–6, 171–2, 230 sacred 15, 117, 210, 217, 220, 233–4, 238, 244 Samson-Himmelstjerna, Hermann von 59 Śaṅkara 5 Sartre, Jean-Paul 163 Scheidemann, Philipp 57 Scheler, Max 8, 47, 68, 77, 79–83, 87, 93–5, 98–9, 101–2, 105–7, 163, 174 and ressentiment 79–83, 87, 93–5, 98–9, 101–2, 105–7 and suffering 174 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 15–16, 21, 27, 31, 62, 113 and Confucius 27 and Laozi 113 Schlegel, Friedrich 19 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 15, 18–19, 132, 199, 255 and Confucianism 18–19 and hermeneutics 199, 255 Schmitt, Carl 139 Schopenhauer, Arthur 48, 109, 165–6, 174 Schwarcz, Vera 55 scientism 45, 51, 69–70, 75, 179 Searle, John 160 Seosan (㽓ቅ) 245 shame 77–8, 103–4

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Shayer, Stanisław 172 Shenxiu (⼲⾔) 247 silence 116–17, 127, 198, 209, 214, 216, 229–30, 244, 251–2 Sinicization/Sinification 25, 44, 75 socialism 25, 29, 57–9, 71, 81 Socrates 2, 26–8, 30–2, 36, 39, 75, 113, 143–4, 149, 167, 169–71, 198–9 Spengler, Oswald 49, 128 Spinoza, Baruch 15, 62, 99, 112, 143 Spinozism 18, 111–12. See also pantheism spirit (Geist) 9, 20–2, 24–5, 47–9, 52–4, 67, 80, 84–5, 87, 101, 105, 115–16, 124, 127, 129, 137, 143, 147, 176, 178–81, 190–3, 205, 212–14, 216 Strawson, P. F. 77–9, 82–3, 85, 94, 275 n.2 suffering 34, 86, 100, 106, 119–20, 143, 165–6, 173–4, 182, 220, 240, 249 Sun Yat–Sen (ᄿ䘌ҭ) 45–6 Suzuki Daisetsu (䠈᳼໻᢭) 175, 203–4, 227 Tagore, Rabindranath 55, 182 Tai Xu (໾㰮) 66 technology 8, 118, 125, 128–9, 132, 192–5, 202–4 teleology 137, 141, 144, 176, 178, 180, 182–4, 187–8, 191, 213, 249 Tezuka Tomio (᠟ฮᆠ䲘) 196 third-person perspective 78, 94, 125, 161 tian (໽, heaven, nature) 15, 19, 36, 92, 105, 145 Tindal, Matthew 16 trace 114, 152, 212, 222, 225, 247, 251 Troeltsch, Ernst 68 Tsujimura Kōichi (䖏ᴥ݀ϔ) 228 uncanniness (Unheimlichkeit) 116, 136–7, 175, 235–6, 243–5 vitalism 7, 44, 47, 55, 58–9, 87 Voltaire (Arouet, François-Marie) 15–16, 19, 27–8, 145 Wagner, Richard 165 Wang Bi (⥟ᔐ) 152 Wang Guowei (⥟೟㎁) 165 Wang Yangming (⥟䱑ᯢ) 7, 53, 71, 73, 104 Wartenburg, Paul Graf Yorck von 133

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Weber, Max 16, 22–5, 31, 48, 81, 111, 126, 165–6, 187, 201 Wertheim, David 61 Westernization 7–8, 44–5, 49, 51, 66, 69–70, 75, 101, 181–2 Wilhelm II 59 Wilhelm, Richard 36, 44, 56, 60, 66–8, 110, 114, 118, 121, 170 Willemer, Marianne von 259 Wittfogel, Karl A. 60, 263 n.9 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 229–32 Wolff, Christian 14–16, 18–19, 50, 109–10, 145 worldview 62, 69, 71, 111, 125, 131, 138–40, 147–9, 205, 254–5 Wright, Dale S. 241–3, 245, 247 Wu, Shengqing 30, 265 n.47 Xiao Shiyi (㭁᏿↙, Hsiao Shih-yi) 122, 134 Xici (㐿䖁) 154–5 xin (ᖗ, heart-mind/mind) 27, 52–3, 73, 96–8, 103–6, 121, 154, 217–18, 223, 225, 228, 238–40, 243–7 Xu Gan (ᕤᑍ) 102 Xu Zhimo (ᕤᖫᨽ) 66 xuanxue ⥘ᅌ (“dark learning”) 70 Xueheng ᅌ㸵 (Critical Review) 30, 265 n.47 Xunzi (㤔ᄤ) 36, 100, 102, 105 Yajnadatta 240 “yellow peril” (gelbe Gefahr) 59–60, 180, 213 Yijing (ᯧ㍧, Book of Changes) 22–3, 66, 73–4, 140, 151–5, 208, 284 n.27 yinyang (䱄䱑) 153 Yuanwu (೰ᙳ) 237

Zaisheng ‫( ⫳ݡ‬The National Renaissance) 72, 75 Zen Buddhism. See Chan/Zen Buddhism Zhang Junmai (ᔉ৯ࣅ) (Chang, Carsun) 7–8, 44–5, 47–59, 63, 65–6, 69–76, 81, 99, 105–6, 108, 187, 258 and Confucianism 44–5, 47–50, 52–5, 63, 65, 69–76, 81, 99, 106, 258 and debate with Ding and Hu 69–70, 72 and institutionalization of the Way (liguo zhi dao ゟ೟П䘧) 71 and Kant 44, 48, 52, 54–6, 65–7, 70–6, 79 and Mou 74–6 Zhang Taiyan (ゴ໾♢) 165 Zhang, Wei 55 Zhao Dongming (䍭ᵅᯢ) 257, 309 n.12 Zheng Tianxi (䜁໽䣿) 96 Zhuangzi (㥞ᄤ) 4–5, 8–10, 37, 63, 66–8, 110–11, 114–21, 123–9, 134, 142–3, 149–51, 190, 198, 203, 211, 214, 245, 253 and butterfly dream (zhuangzhou mengdie 㥞਼໶㵊) 10, 203 and free and easy wandering (xiaoyao you 䗡䘭䘞) 116, 127, 134 and nourishing life (yangsheng 仞⫳) 68, 116–18, 120, 122 and transformation (hua ࣪) 116, 151 and trees 121, 125, 127 and uselessness (wuyong ⛵⫼) 119, 121, 123–5, 127 and zhenren (ⳳҎ, authentic, genuine, perfected person/life) 116–18 Ziarek, Krzysztof 250 Ziegler, Leopold 68 Žižek, Slavoj 213, 299 n.41 Zongmi (ᅫᆚ) 222, 226, 236, 241

Afterword to the 2019 Edition One purpose of the present book was to illustrate how Western philosophy is already entangled in an intercultural history and it need not fear its intercultural future. This work employs a Zhuangzian strategy of undoing fixations by exposing the limitations of false claims to universality through a series of historical examples focused on early twentieth-century interactions between Chinese and German thought. “The Autumn Floods” (Qiushui ⾟∈) chapter of the Zhuangzi, which fascinated Georg Misch as an image of “break-through” (Durchbruch), depicts how the great river is shocked by its own smallness when entering the sea. The second passage of Qiushui speaks of the frog in the well that cannot perceive the wider world.1 This work articulates a way to “breakthrough” and “break-out” by proposing alternatives to the modern Western narrative that the West alone possesses (in Husserl’s language) universality, rationality, and infinity: philosophy. This book is not intended to be exhaustive, even of the era in its title. I am happy that one main criticism of this project is that it should be intensified and expanded beyond these pages to engage further intercultural interactions such as the French reception of Chinese philosophy or modern East Asian adaptations and transformations of Western philosophy.2 This work traces an “alternative history” in recovering forgotten and repressed intercultural moments in modern Western philosophy. The task could be described as a way of “reviving the perished and restoring the broken” – to use an expression adopted from the Chunqiu ᯹⾟ by the new Confucian philosophers Mou Zongsan ⠳ᅫϝ, Tang Junyi ૤৯↙, Xu Fuguan ᕤᕽ㾔, and Zhang Junmai ᔉ৯ࣅ in “A Manifesto for a Re-appraisal of Sinology and Reconstruction of Chinese Culture” (1958).3 The “New Confucian Manifesto” marked a turning point in the revival of Confucianism (often dismissed in the West and attacked from the May Fourth Movement to the Cultural Revolution in China) as a viable contemporary philosophical perspective and discourse. The manifesto analyzes the limitations of two interpretive strategies: (1) the external application of the universal to the particular that lacks the familiarity and intimacy that is necessary for genuine understanding; (2) an absorption in a particular discourse and way of life that prevents critical reflection and insight

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into the broader significance of that form of thought and life. New interpretive models are required that would be appropriate for recognizing the universality and rationality that is to varying degrees explicit and implicit in non-Western traditions while calling them to rethink and transform themselves under altered conditions. It is in this sense that they could elucidate a “new” Confucianism in the context of colonialism, modernization, Westernization, communist revolution, and the need for Chinese democracy. Their call of “reviving the perished and restoring the broken” informs this project in two ways: (1) recalling the Chinese and Asian philosophical models that the normative or “high” Western philosophical tradition has marginalized and excluded by (2) returning to European thinkers who have transgressed these boundaries, despite their imperfect understanding, in order to engage in dialogue and exchange with Asian philosophical discourses. As an alternative to both the “Eurocentric” conception of philosophy and the rejection of philosophy as a merely ethnocentric construct, this book exhibits how intercultural philosophizing is already underway and its past has lessons for the present. The intention motivating the writing this book is accordingly twofold: (1) it is historical in tracing the interpretations and appropriations of Chinese and Buddhist thought in twentieth-century German philosophy; (2) it is philosophical in interrogating historical moments for the sake of dis- and re-orienting the modern Western conception of philosophy. The idea and practice of philosophizing is fixated and limited in this conception as a uniquely occidental paradigm following a single telos from ancient Greece to Western modernity, uninformed and undisturbed by the wider world. I pursued tracking historical moments of intercultural dialogue and misunderstanding to contest the limiting perspectives and narratives of the isolated autonomy of philosophy constructed as a uniquely Western social-historical achievement. One intriguing moment in classical Chinese philosophy is the destabilization and transformation of limited perspectives in the Zhuangzi. This Zhuangzian strategy becomes intercultural and contemporary in the present work in weaving together threads from varied and contradictory discourses to respond to our hermeneutical situation that is characterized by conflict, negotiation, and coming to understanding between culturally diverse individuals and groups. This volume accordingly advocates, in a historically contextualized way, the emerging intercultural turn in contemporary philosophy in contrast to both ethnocentric absorption and coercive universalism. Insofar as we are participating in the intercultural turn, and debating its prospects, it is worthwhile to note how this work’s intercultural strategy diverges from other efforts to persuade academic

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philosophy to transform itself along with the phenomena that it would interpret. The conventional Western universalist approach threatens to reduce nonWestern philosophical discourses to a questionable notion of globalized modern Western universality, understood typically through scientific naturalism and conventional capitalist liberalism; the Western multiculturalist posits a variety of isolated forms of particularity, which are in danger of reification as unified cultural types closed off from one another. Recalling the “New Confucian Manifesto,” and its advocacy for the continuing relevance of renewing and re-appropriating Chinese cultural forms and models while critiquing absorption and reification in limiting essentialist notions of what it signifies to be Chinese, philosophers cannot forsake a critical sensibility in being confronted by claims about the essence of a culture (whether their own or another), whether these be articulated in ethnocentric or racialized Western discourses or under conditions of nationalist self-promotion for the sake of consolidating a sense of the Chinese people and Chinese philosophy as expressions of its identity or essence. The present hermeneutical strategy stresses the “inter” as the non-identity between the universal and the particular. The oscillation occurring between two poles, which cannot be finalized, through the effort and play of intercultural encounter, exchange, and dialogue signifies the transformation and unfolding of new discourses and communities through which multiple pasts and voices are appropriated anew. Instead of identifying hermeneutics with the hermeneutics of identity (whether in a universalist or particularist form), the on-going intercultural turn in philosophy indicates the need for a hermeneutics of non-identity.4 The actuality of the intercultural is a crucial thread traced in my work through a series of historical examples that offer lessons for the present. What does this expression “intercultural” mean? To sketch an example: not only are Chinese thought, culture, and society altered through a variety of encounters with the Western world; Western discourses and practices have themselves been impacted and reshaped through such encounters. Such stimuli have long been recognized in studies of art, history, literature, and politics. Even the history of science and technology is open to reflecting on their non-Western sources and influences. Philosophy has resisted adequately recognizing the dynamics of the intercultural in its own formation despite a long series of engagements and encounters. Tracing the ostensibly merely marginal encounters between Eastern and Western discourses in German philosophy disproves the thesis that Western philosophy has an autonomous history that excludes non-Western thought.

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Diogenes Laertius mentioned arguments concerning whether only the Greeks knew philosophy at the beginning of Lives of the Eminent Philosophers.5 Yet the idea that philosophy is uniquely Western is a modern construction codified in the 18th- and 19th-centuries. Is an “intercultural turn” possible? Rorty maintained that the best that can be done is to liberalize one’s ethnocentrism. Each cultural nexus perceives itself as the center. Isn’t traditional Chinese thought as Sinocentric as modern Western philosophy is Eurocentric? Shouldn’t there be a deconstruction of the Chinese philosophical tradition and its sense of its own priority? The deconstruction of Sino-dao-centrism has already occurred through the destruction of traditional Chinese forms of life and thought in the 19th- and 20-centuries. Western violence has reduced other intellectual paradigms to the merely pictorial, poetic, primitive, and mythological; to the other outside of philosophy as a genuine thinking concerned with (in Husserl’s words) universal concepts and infinite tasks. Chinese and other intellectual discourses, which contain their own robust conceptual and argumentative elements, have already been radically and repeatedly disrupted in encounters with Western colonialism and through other- and self-imposed modernization. The Sinocentrism of traditional Chinese discourses has already been repeatedly interrupted and broken, as has the particularity of non-Western traditions that endured the traumas of colonization or semi-colonization and coerced modernization. Western philosophy and culture, interconnected in the assertion that philosophy is the only genuinely universal discourse and Western civilization the one truly universal culture, are placed in an asymmetrical position to the non-Western world. The study of non-Western and intercultural philosophies indicates the ideological nature and particularity of such false claims to universality. The West has been idealized as the only genuine realm of the universal and the infinite; yet this fixation is sustained by building walls that bely its very claim to be universal.

Notes 1 I am grateful to David Chai and Bret Davis for their comments that inspired this afterword. I especially appreciate how they noted the Zhuangzian strategies of overturning limiting perspectives. Davis introduced Zhuangzi’s image of the “frog in the well” that I appropriated here and in my Interview with Richard Marshall: “how not to be a frog in a well: chinese/german/buddhist philosophy,” 3:AM Magazine, 14/07/2018.

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2 Reviews include Steve Burik, Global Intellectual History (2017), Erik Hoogcarspel, Phenomenological Reviews (2018), Kwok-ying Lau, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (2018), Jay Goulding, Journal of World Philosophies (2018), David Chai, Philosophy East and West (2018), Halla Kim, Frontiers of Philosophy in China (2018), Jean-Yves Heurtebise, Journal of Chinese Philosophy (forthcoming), Jason Wirth, Dao (forthcoming). 3 “Wei Zhongguo Wenua Jinggao Shijie Renshi Xuanyan” ⚎Ё೟᭛࣪ᭀਞϪ⬠Ҏ຿ ᅷ㿔. Carsun Chang, The Development of Neo-Confucian Thought, vol. 2 (New York: Bookman Associates, 1962), 455–483. 4 On the ethics and hermeneutics of alterity and non-identity, see (forthcoming) Eric S. Nelson, Levinas, Adorno, and the Ethics of the Material Other (Albany: SUNY Press, 2019). 5 Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers. Translated by Pamela Mensch (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), Book I:1–12.