Eric S. Nelson - Chinese and Buddhist Philosophy in Early Twentieth-Century German Thought-Bloomsbury Academic (2017)

Chinese and Buddhist Philosophy
in Early Twentieth-Century
German Thought
Also available from Bloomsbury:
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Arindam Chakrabarti and Ralph Weber
Confucian Ethics in Western Discourse, Wai-ying Wong
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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
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Names: Nelson, Eric Sean, author.
Title: Chinese and Buddhist philosophy in early twentieth-century
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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.
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To my parents, Lydia and Richard Nelson
Contents
Acknowledgments viii
Introduction 1
1 A Peculiar Journey: Confucian Philosophy in German Thought 13

2 The Problem of Life in China and Europe: Zhang Junmai,
Eucken, and Driesch 43
3 Resentment and Ressentiment: Nietzsche, Scheler, and
Confucian Ethics 77
4 Technology and the Way: Daoism in Buber and Heidegger 109
5 Heidegger, Misch, and the “Origins” of Philosophy 131
6 Phenomenology, Eurocentrism, and Asia: Husserl and Heidegger 159
7 Encounter, Dialogue, and Learning: Martin Buber and Zen Buddhism 201
8 Nothingness, Language, Emptiness: Heidegger and Chan Buddhism 225
Conclusion: Toward an Intercultural Philosophy 253
Notes 261
Bibliography 310
Index 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” 科技與道：布伯、海德格爾和
道家, Changbai xuekan 長白學刊 (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.”
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 Yaʻqūb ibn ʼIsḥāq 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
所謂東西者、蓋彼此時俗之相稱爾。非占其中而定其東西也。
苟以佛爲夷、而不遵其道、則舜生於東夷、文王生於西夷。
可夷其人而不遵其道乎。所出迹也、所行道也。
—己和
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.
2 Chinese and Buddhist Philosophy in Early Twentieth-Century German Thought
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
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 莊子 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
蘭學). The Japanese scholar Nishi Amane 西周 (1829–1897) is credited with
coining the expression 哲學 (Japanese: tetsugaku; Chinese: zhexue 哲學) that
combines the kanji characters for “wisdom” (哲) and “learning” (學).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 self-
inquiry 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 counter-
criticism 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
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 mid-
twentieth-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.
Introduction 7
Description of the chapters
Chapter 1 offers an elucidation of the reception of Confucius (Kongzi 孔子) 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 張君勱 (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 Neo-
Confucianism inspired by Wang Yangming 王陽明. 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 全盤西化). At issue in these debates were the
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 Neo-
Confucianism 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 論語), 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 仁). 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 老子 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 European-
Western character of philosophy, their idea of the unique exclusive spiritual
identity of Europe, and how these claims shape their interpretations of Asia
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 禪 Buddhism in
the context of the exclusion and marginalization of Zen Buddhism in twentieth-
century 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 空) 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.
子曰：“予欲無言。”子貢曰：“子如不言，則小子何述焉?”子
曰： “天何言哉?四時行焉，百物生焉，天何言哉? ”
孔子《論語》17:19.
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
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 儒家) philosophies despite
their rich and varied traditions of reflection and argumentation in premodern and
modern China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. Ru 儒 signifies “erudite” or “scholar”;
jia 家 refers 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 孔子), 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 15
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 天 (typically
translated as “heaven”; less frequently translated as “God”) in the Analects
(Lunyu 論語) 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
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, Popper-
Lynkeus, 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.
Part One: The Europeanization of Confucius
The Chinese and the European Confucius
Early ru 儒 or Confucian discourses prioritized rituals (li 禮), which should be

broadly construed as appropriate practices, socially oriented individual self-
cultivation, 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 仁)
directed toward the well-being of others, which calls for (2) interpretively and
appropriately recognizing and taking into consideration (i.e., zhi 知, knowing)
the specific roles and circumstances of others in relations of asymmetrical
reciprocity (shu 恕); and (3) self-cultivation oriented through pedagogical
exemplars and reflectively enacted models toward becoming an ethically
exemplary person (junzi 君子) and potentially a sage (shengren 圣人). 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
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
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
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 self-
conscious 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
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:
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 易經, 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
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
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 anti-
Semitism 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,
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 anti-
Semitic 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 twentieth-
century. 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
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
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 心), patterning principle (li 理), and material force (qi 氣) 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.
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
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 老子], 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
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 新文化運動) from 1915
to 1923 and the associated May Fourth Movement (wusi yundong 五四運動)
in 1919, published the inaugural issue of their journal Xueheng 學衡 (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
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, self-
fashioning, 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
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.
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
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 孟子) to dialogically awaken King Hui of Liang (Liang Hui Wang 梁惠
王) 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
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
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 道
德經.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 荀子 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
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 other-
oriented 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
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 co-
emergence 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 仁
contains the radicals for human (ren 人) and two (er 二), 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
is an elusive notion, as Jaspers notes. What then is ren? Analects 12:2 defines
ren as “loving people” (airen 愛人), 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
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 恕 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 四書)—
the Analects, the Mengzi 孟子, Practicing the Mean (Zhongyong 中庸), and the
Great Learning (Daxue 大學)—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 self-
reflective 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 孔子) 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
modern philosophy through the asymmetrical yet evocative interaction between

the young Chinese philosopher and political thinker Zhang Junmai 張君勱
(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 self-
reflection on “life” (shengming 生命).
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 新文化
運動), beginning in the late 1910s, to the “New Sensation” school (xin ganjue pai
新感覺派) 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
The Problem of Life in China and Europe 45
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 美國化).
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 胡適 (1891–1962) gradually moved
away from advocating radical Americanization toward interpreting liberal
democratic Enlightenment thought in relation to a renewal of Confucian li 禮
(ritual propriety) and de 德 (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 顧頡剛 (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 Yat-
Sen 孫逸仙 (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 三民主義 (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
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 一盤散沙) 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 直覺 or, less
frequently as unmediated perception, zhiguan 直觀—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.
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 道 as
humanity, alluding to the statement in the Analects (Lunyu 論語) that the
human broadens the Way instead of the Way broadening the human, and the
concept of de 德 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 梁啟超
(1873–1929), and the military expert Jiang Baili 蔣百里 (Jiang Fangzhen 蔣方震,
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
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–
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
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 self-
cultivation 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.
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 means-
ends 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 全盤西化; 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 生命哲學) in
his 1921 essay “An Outline of Eucken’s Philosophy of Spiritual Life” (“Woyikeng
jingshen shenghuo zhexue dagai” 倭伊鏗精神生活哲學大概).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
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 精神本體) for
Zhang. Eucken’s contemporary significance lies in particular in his discourse
of “spiritual life” (Geistesleben; jingshen shenghuo 精神生活) 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 精神自由).
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 heart-
mind (renxin 人心) 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,
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 精神的改造) 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 孟子)
and Wang Yangming 王陽明, 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
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 梁漱溟 (1893–
1988) Eastern and Western Cultures and their Philosophies (Dongxi wenhua ji qi
zhexue 東西文化及其哲學). 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.
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 講學社) 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 Neo-
Kantianism 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
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 (國立東南大學) in Nanjing and Peking University (北京大學) on
Kant, the philosophy of the organic, contemporary philosophical tendencies,
and problems of modern psychology.44 Qu Shiying 瞿世英 (1901–1976) (alias
Qu Junong 瞿菊農) 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
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
中國共產黨). 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 中國國民
黨) and the Communist party, which eventually forced him into American exile
near the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949.
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, anti-
colonial, and (together with Theodor Lessing) anti-militaristic pacifist and anti-
nationalistic 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
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
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 Vereins-
Zeitung: 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
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
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
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 有沒
有) or good/not good (hao bu hao 好不好).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
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
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
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 易經 that has been translated into multiple Western
languages, and the Zhuangzi 莊子. 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 融合) 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 太虚, the poet Xu Zhimo 徐志摩, 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
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 太乙金
華宗旨) 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). Hans-
Georg Gadamer later described the emancipatory impact of Lessing’s book
on his generation: it was a “second rate” work that had a revolutionary effect
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 庖丁) from the “Nourishing
Life” (yangsheng zhu 養生主) 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
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 科學
與玄學論戰), held between Zhang and the geologist Ding Wenjiang 丁文江
(1887–1936) in 1923, and the related “debate between science and life” (kexue yu
rensheng guan zhi zheng 科學與人生觀之爭) or worldview controversy between
scientism (kexue zhuyi 科學主義) and “view of life” (rensheng guan 人生觀).101
Ding, who also participated in Liang’s study trip in Europe with Zhang, was
unimpressed by the European life-philosophers. The positivistic and pragmatist-
oriented 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
Ding indicted Zhang for following fashionable European irrationalist life-

philosophy, and polemically called his thinking xuanxue 玄學 (after the “dark
learning” of Wei-Jin 魏晉 Neo-Daoism) instead of zhexue 哲學 (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
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 立國
之道) 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
知行合一).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
Philosophical Thoughts” published in the journal Zaisheng 再生 (The 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 仁)
and wisdom (zhi 智), and Buddhist philosophy the cultivation of wisdom (zhi)
and universal compassion (bei 悲; 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
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
心).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 萬物一體).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 己
欲立而立人，己欲達而達人); (2) the Yijing 易经 suggests that the Way (dao)
prior to taking form (xing er shang 形而上) and the formed concrete particular
things (xing er xia 形而下) are one and the same; and (3) Lu Xiangshan 陸象
山 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
Chinese philosophical concept of the harmony of field-figure and essence-

function (ti-yong 體用), 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 牟宗三 (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 五十自述, 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 唐君毅, and Xu Fuguan 徐復觀, published a historic manifesto and
program for a modern Confucian philosophy in 1958 in the Hong Kong journal
Minzhu pinglun 民主評論 (Democratic Review) and in the journal—reborn in
Taipei after the Chinese civil war—Zaisheng entitled: “A Manifesto for a Re-
appraisal of Sinology and Reconstruction of Chinese Culture” (“Wei Zhongguo
Wenhua Jinggao Shijie Renshi Xuanyan” 為中國文化敬告世界人士宣言).126
Both thinkers shared, despite their personal differences expressed by Mou
in his autobiography, an interest in and commitment to synthesizing Neo-
Confucian 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 生命在其自己) and the Chinese
intellectual tradition’s conception of intrinsic or innate moral knowing (liangzhi
良知) 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-
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 life-
philosophical 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
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
Resentment and Ressentiment 79
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 twentieth-
century 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 life-
philosophical 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 social-
political 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
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 self-

poisoning 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
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 仁) 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
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 non-
recognition 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 emotional-
cognitive state. Nor is ressentiment the same as revenge, which for both Nietzsche
and the early twentieth-century Nietzsche-influenced Chinese author Lu Xun
魯迅 (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.
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
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 large-

scale 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
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 小心 (“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 self-
sacrifice 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 Christian-
Jewish 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
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.
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 論語), a diverse fragmentary compilation representing
divergent interpretative tendencies attributed to Kongzi (孔子) 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 狂人日記), one of his prominent short stories
and—similarly to “The True Story of Ah Q” (A Q Zhengzhuan 阿Q正傳)—a
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 酸儒 (literally, “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.
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 儒 (Confucian) 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 修 or xiushen 修身) 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 君
子). 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 小人) 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.
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
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 慍. Yun has been translated in various
English editions of the Analects as indignation, feeling hurt or bothered, and
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 不知) one:
學而時習之、不亦說乎。有朋自遠方來、不亦樂乎。人不知而不慍、
不亦君子乎。
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 慍) at other’s failure to
recognize (buzhi 不知) one, is this not to be ethically noble (junzi 君子)?26
In Analects 1:1, being noble, or ethically exemplary, is explicitly linked with

not being yun 慍, which has been translated as indignant, feeling hurt, to be
bothered, and resentful. This feeling of resentment is linked to buzhi 不知,
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:
不患人之不己知、患不知人也。
I do not worry (huan 患) about not being recognized. I worry about not
recognizing (buzhi 不知) 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 四書). Mengzi 孟子 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 患 functions as a form of
anxiousness that is contrasted with you 憂. 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 曾子 specified in the Analects, the ethical vocation
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 尤) others” (bu yuantian, bu youren 不怨天，不尤人).
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:
事父母幾諫。見志不從、又敬不違、勞而不怨。
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 怨).
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
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 義) and that which concerns personal advantage and profit (li 利).
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 聖人). In Analects 6:30, in response to Zigong’s 子貢 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 修己以敬). But,
in the ensuing conversation about the sage, even the great Yao 堯 and Shun 舜
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 self-
cultivation. 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
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 伯夷
and Shuqi 叔齐.36 It is claimed in Analects 7:15 that these two brothers did not feel
resentment (yuan 怨), 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 怨) against them.” Yuan 怨 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 道
術 chapter of the “New Writings” (Xinshu 新書), a political treatise by the early
Han dynasty scholar Jia Yi 賈誼 (200–168 BCE) advocating the regulation of
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 怨).”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 憤 (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
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 鄭天錫) 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 心). 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 儒 or
“Confucian” authors of the Analects, attributed to Kongzi, interpreted the
distinction between the exemplary person (junzi 君子) and the petty person
(xiaoren 小人), the “small person” who is unable to exhibit “smallness” or
humbleness of the heart-mind, in light of the negative affects. The petty or
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 self-
interest 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 大學) 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 慍 (to be indignant, to
feel hurt or discontented by), yuan 怨 (to blame, to complain of), fen 憤, and
huan 患 and you 憂 (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 moral-
psychological 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 self-
rectification requisite for dismantling resentment in achieving a condition of
asymmetrically gradated and appropriately enacted humane benevolence.
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 恕) 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 恕)—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:
不患無位、患所以立; 不患莫己知、求爲可知也。

I do not worry (huan 患) 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
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 self-
cultivation 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 怨) 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 self-
critical spirit is expressed in Analects 4:17:
見賢思齊焉; 見不賢而內自省也。
When you encounter good persons, think of becoming their equal. When you
encounter inferior persons, examine yourself.
“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 墨子, for example, warned how lack of
order, obedience, and mutual love allowed resentment and hatred to flourish.45
As with Xunzi 荀子 after him, Mozi contrasted “public righteousness” (gongyi
公義) with private or selfish resentment (siyuan 私怨).46
Even while early Confucian thinkers shared this terminology, they rejected
Moist (mojia 墨家) 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
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”
(君子周而不比, 小人比而不周).
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 孝經) 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 修身).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 self-
sacrifice 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
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 徐幹 (170–217) articulated in his
Balanced Discourses (Zhonglun 中論) 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 表記 chapter of the Book of Rites (Liji 禮記)—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 禮) 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 詩經)
is centered in an appeal to their function in promoting ethical self-cultivation
and balancing nature and nurture. The classic songs of Zhou 周 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 怨) 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:
巧言、令色、足恭、左丘明恥之、丘亦恥之。匿怨而友其人、左丘明恥之、
丘亦恥之。
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 self-
cultivation 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,
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 self-
cultivation (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 恕) 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 推) 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 王陽
明, 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
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 天, which should be understood
as signifying something closer to “nature” than to a spiritual realm), Xunzi
accordingly stated:
自知者不怨人，知命者不怨天;怨人者窮，怨天者無志。失之己，

反之人，豈不迂乎哉!
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.
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
(梁惠王) 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 heart-
mind 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” (是故江河不惡小谷之滿己也，故能大).66
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
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
encounter with a classical Chinese text such as the Zhuangzi 莊子 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 道家) classics, the Daodejing 道德經 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 老子 and Zhuangzi were taken up in early twentieth-
century 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
Technology and the Way: Daoism in Buber and Heidegger 111
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 “Lao-
Zhuang” 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
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 儒 or 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
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 anti-
Socrates examined in Chapter 1, the mature Schelling has a brief but thought-
provoking 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.
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.
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 道教) 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 聊齋誌異) of Pu Songling
蒲松齡.20 These strange stories of seductive fox spirits (huli jing 狐狸精), angry
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 逍遙遊) within
life in order to nurture and nourish it (yangsheng 養生). 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 真
人.23 Maurice S. Friedman describes Buber’s version of the genuine or perfected
person (zhenren) as the one who harmonizes the greatest transformations (hua
化) with the fullest sense of unity.24 In a description that captures an element of
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 無為), 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 列子, 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.
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 大宗師). 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 non-
doing 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
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 “non-
doing,” 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
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
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 惠子 concerning whether
humans can understand the enjoyment of fish from Chapter 17 (qiushui 秋水)
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 達生), 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 心) 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 外物) 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
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 non-
coercive 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 蕭師毅) 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” 有之以為利，無之
以為用, which might be conventionally translated as “benefit from that which
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 有 (typically translated as to have, to be, to exist) as “beings”
and yong 用 (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 盅) 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 天地). 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
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
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 non-
cognitive 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 自然 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)
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
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
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 being-
here (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
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 social-
historical 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
Schleiermacher and Dilthey. In particular, the internal moment of philosophical

truth as the disclosure of world and language is intended to overcome the social-
scientific, 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 world-
picture—and its destructive reduction of beings to instrumental calculation—
which originates in the Greek experience of nature as physis (φύσις).3
Heidegger, Misch, and the “Origins” of Philosophy 133
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
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 莊子 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” 道 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 逍遙遊) 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 道德經 with Paul Shih-yi Hsiao (Xiao Shiyi 蕭師
毅) 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
‘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.
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 無為 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.
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
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 non-
philosophers 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 曲阜, 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 social-
historical 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
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 lecture-
course 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 life-
philosophy 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
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 易經, 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
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.
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 self-
reflection, 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 秋水)
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 one-
sided 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
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
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 anti-
globalist 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
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 天) in the Analects (Lunyu 論語) 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 self-
reflection, 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
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
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
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 lived-
experience (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 life-
philosophical way here the xing 行 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
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 墨家) concerns with equality and fair social organization, and legalist
(fajia 法家) 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
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 “life-
philosophy,” what is life? Life is in this hermeneutical context a structuring-
structured 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 social-
political 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
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 化) 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 易經 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 成中
英. 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
周易 (Changes of Zhou)—the earlier strata of what became the Yijing—through its
classical Confucian (rujia 儒家), Daoist (daojia 道家), Neo-Confucian (xin rujia
新儒家), and modern Confucian (xiandai xin rujia 現代新儒家) 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
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 pre-
conceptual 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 王弼 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 象). 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 天地
人)—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.
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 本体 (root-body) and
yinyang 陰陽 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
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 onto-
generative image found in Xici 系辞, 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 乾).71
The word xing 形, which appears in Xici 系辞, 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
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
系辞), I. 11. It tells of how in the beginning of the universe the supreme ultimate
(taiji 太极) 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” 易有太極，是生
兩儀，兩儀生四象，四象生八卦).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 structured-
structuring 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
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
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
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 identity-
thinking 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 self-
understanding (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
Phenomenology, Eurocentrism, and Asia 161
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 meaning-
holism, 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
of consciousness, a holistic arc or circuit between the intentional and non-

intentional 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 Merleau-
Ponty, 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
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 (改造, Renewal or Reconstruction)
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
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 twentieth-
century.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 王
國維 (1877–1927) and the philosopher and revolutionary Zhang Taiyan 章太
炎 (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” 叔
本華與尼采 (“Schopenhauer and Nietzsche”) published in 1904, which revealed
Schopenhauer’s profound influence on him and that can be seen in his path-
breaking modern interpretation of the canonical novel The Dream of the Red
Chamber (Hongloumeng 紅樓夢).
Nietzsche’s portrait of Buddhism as a religion based in the negative life-
denying emotions of resentment and revenge and a schematization of repression
was rejected as dubious and overly psychological by Max Weber.21 Weber
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 nineteenth-
century debated issues such as whether (1) the Buddha’s teaching was world-
negating 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 non-
metaphysical, 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
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 mid-
1920s. 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 ethical-
religious attitude is accordingly post-mythic and atheistic; it points toward the
full autonomy of the theoretical attitude through its practices of renunciation.
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
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 ethical-
religious 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
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
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
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
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 non-
self. 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
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
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
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 京都學派).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.
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.
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
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 Greek-
born 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
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
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 non-
European 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
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 non-
Western 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
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.
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
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
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,
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 張君勱, 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 world-
disclosure 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.
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
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 religious-
mythical, 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
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 莊子, 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
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 Eurocentric-
cosmopolitan 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
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 planetary-
interstellar 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
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
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:
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
Auseinandersetzung that is simultaneously a coming-to-mutual-understanding

(verstehen) of one another as well as a differentiating setting-apart-from-each-
other (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” (いき or 粋) into Western languages. The expression iki
was explored by Kuki Shūzō 九鬼周造 in his 1930 work The Structure of “Iki” (
「いき」の構造, “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 ハイ
デッガーの哲学).
This literary dialogue modifies factual details and the structure of the
conversation between Heidegger and Tezuka Tomio 手塚富雄 (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
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 道, 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
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,
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 (禪, 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
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 無爲) 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.
Encounter, Dialogue, and Learning 203
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
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
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 bio-
spiritual practices such as meditation. In the face of such seemingly relentless
“spiritual materialism,” there are potential counter-tendencies to the reification
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.
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
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 太乙金
華宗旨) and the Yijing 易經 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
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, ‫חסידות‬‎‎) originally signifies “piety”
and this movement in modern East European Judaism accentuated the
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 non-
Western 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
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 空).
The Kyōto School thinker Keiji Nishitani 西谷啓治 (1900–1990) described
“absolute nothingness” (zettai mu 絶対無) 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
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
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
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.
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
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 問答):
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
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 (悟り, Ch.
wu 悟) 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” (一心, Ch.
yixin; Jp. isshin) with the real, signifying “seeing into one’s own nature” (見性,
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
真如). Zhen 真 indicates the real and ru 如 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 (洪州宗) in Tang
dynasty China, “ordinary mind is the Way” (pingchang xin shi dao 平常心是道)
and “this mind is the Buddha” (shixin shi fo 是心是佛).52 Mazu Daoyi 馬祖道一
(709–788) described how “though the dharma is not attached to anything, every
phenomenon one has contact with is thusness.”53 The Japanese Sōtō (曹洞, Ch.
Caodong) Zen master Eihei Dōgen 禅師道元 (1200–1253) illuminated how
mindfulness within the ordinary and everyday is the perfection of Zen meditation
(坐禅, 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.
The I-thou question was explicitly posed and addressed by philosophers

associated with the Kyōto school. Nishida Kitarō 西田幾多郎 (1870–1945)
published his essay “I and Thou” (“Watashi to nanji” 私と汝) 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 mid-
1930s. 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 (公案, 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
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 self-
realization 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 (現成公案, “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
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
Zongmi 圭峰宗密 (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 本).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 己和 (Hamheo
Deuktong 涵虚得通) (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 顯正論 (Exposition of
the Correct) is a response to the Neo-Confucian critique of Buddhism articulated
by Jeong Dojeon 鄭道傳 (1342–1398) in his Array of Critiques of Buddhism (Bulssi
Japbyeon 佛氏雜辨) from 1398.66 Gihwa distinguished two forms of Buddhist
“ethics” in this work: (1) an elementary “shallow” level of precept-following
(夫五戒十善教中之最淺者也。本爲機之最下者而設也) and (2) a non-dual
practicing of the six perfections (pāramitā; luidu 六度) associated with the
recognition of the mutuality of generosity (dāna; bushi 布施) and dependent
origination (paṭiccasamuppāda; yuanqi 緣起). 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 眞如). The
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 臨濟 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 惠能 tearing up the sutras and the provocative utterance by
Linji Yixuan 臨濟義玄 (d. 866 CE): “If you meet the Buddha, kill him” (feng
fo sha fo 逢佛殺佛). 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.”
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 (仁, 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
從空背空。
To pursue emptiness is to lose emptiness.1
Introduction
In the intertextual discourse of comparative philosophy in East and West, Martin

Heidegger and Chan (禪; 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 本
心) and self-nature (zixing 自性).2 The movement of dereification occurring
through encountering nothingness (das Nichts) in Heidegger’s thinking and
emptiness (kong 空) 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 一如; Skt. tathatā)
of the myriad things (wanfa 萬法) 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
Buddhist discourses and practices, as the history of Chan Buddhism itself

reveals. The incessantly stylized and restylized figure of Linji Yixuan 臨濟義玄
(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 敕修百丈清規)
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 圭峰宗密 (780–841). Zongmi condemned what he saw as its
immoral antinomian consequences of specific teachings in Daoism and Hongzhou
洪州 Chan, to the warning of the fox gong’an (公案; Jp. kōan) concerning
Baizhang 百丈 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 self-
destructuring of language, there is nothing outside of communication and the
Nothingness, Language, Emptiness 227
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 西谷啓治. Nishitani contended in Religion and
Nothingness (Shūkyō to wa nanika 宗教とは何か, 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
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 心) 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 大慧宗杲

(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 無] and the Chinese term for śūnyatā
[kong 空]). Comparison is inevitably external and reifying, and the “not” of the
incomparable does not appear to permit much to be said.
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
人不敢忘心。恐落空無撈摸處。不知空本無空。唯一真法界耳。—黄檗希運
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-
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
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
śūnyatā, they characteristically understood it as signifying either an illogical self-

contradictory 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
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 馬
祖道一.
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 anti-
metaphysical positivistic Western philosophy persistently warn?
Part Two: Emptying Emptiness
Emptiness, not sacredness
分別凡聖煩惱轉盛。
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
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
問答) that became the basis of the “public case” or gong’an 公案 literature and
meditative practice. One encounter dialogue, which became the first case of the
Blue Cliff Record (Biyan lu 碧巖錄) collection of gong’an, is the legend of Emperor
Wu of the Liang Dynasty (梁武帝) welcoming Bodhidharma 菩提達摩 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 廓然
無聖).” 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 anti-
orthodoxy 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 弘忍 is reported to have dismissed
meritorious offerings and the pursuit of blessings (futian 福田), 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
exposure to that which is not a something, not even a noumenal or transcendent

something, but nothing.
In an exchange from the Zhaozhou Yulu 趙州語錄 (Recorded Sayings of
Zhaozhou), which became the first gong’an in the Gateless Gate (Wumen Guan
無門關), a monk asked; “Does a dog have Buddha-nature or not (gouzi foxing 狗
子佛性)”? Despite the inherent Buddha-nature that is inherent in every sentient
being, the master replied “Not” or “No.”48 The Chinese word wu 無 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 虛無. 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 self-
empty 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 眞如) of
things—empty and “just as they are” (faru ru 法如如)—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
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
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
圜悟克勤 (1063–1135).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 self-
glorification. 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
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 無位真人)—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 一大事): “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 五臺山), 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 臨濟語錄 (Recorded
Sayings of Linji): there are episodes portraying Linji’s ambiguous success in

dealing with Puhua 普化, 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 平常心是道).
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-in-
the-world” (in-der-Welt-sein).82
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 生死卽涅槃), just as suffering
is awakening (fannao ji puti 煩惱卽菩提). 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 大佛頂
首楞嚴經攝論): “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
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 超越文字的
話語) 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 黃檗山
斷際禪師傳心法要), 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
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
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 以心傳心)
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
Way” and that “this mind is the Buddha” (shixin shi fo 是心是佛).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 龐蘊) 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
大事) is not supernatural or sacred but “this mind” (cixin 此心).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 虛無).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 無我) or the destructuring
of ordinary self-conceptions, is provoked through speaking otherwise through
the “living words” (shengyu 聖語) 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
the occasion of self-awakening.126 Instead of emphasizing its ease, the Korean

Seon master Hyujeong 休靜 known as Seosan Taesa 西山大師 (1520–1604)
compares it to a mosquito biting an impenetrable iron statue. Dahui—a figure
who is closely associated with the development of kanhua 看話 or gong’an
introspection meditation on the crucial phase or punch line (huatou 話頭) 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 惠能 (638–713), “non-abiding the basis
or fundamental” (wuzhu wei ben 無住為本).135
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 心銘 of Niutou Farong 牛頭法融
(594–657) in the Jingde chuandenglu 景德傳燈錄, “just now non-abiding, just
now original mind” (jian zai wu zhu jian zai ben xin 見在無住見在本心).139 The
root mind (benxin 本心) is not an isolated essence, substance, or foundation,
as the Chinese word ben 本 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 non-
habitual 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 non-
abiding or a free and easy dwelling without support. In non-abiding, empty
illumination manifests itself (wu chu anxin xu ming zi lu 無處安心虚明
自露).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.
The self-destructuring of emptiness
有即是無, 無即是有。
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 自性).149
Expressions such as “Buddha nature” (foxing 佛性) and “original mind”
(benxin 本心) might appear more metaphysical than deconstructive. Youru
Wang has portrayed how Huineng challenges Shenxiu’s 神秀 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 任運). The self-destructuring of the
awakening mind is illustrated in Mazu’s “neither mind nor Buddha” (wuxin wufo
無心無佛); 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
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
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
正覺無覺, 真空不空。
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 self-
absorption in the one, emptiness is the one suchness (yiru 一如) 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
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 法如) in the midst of phenomena (fazhong
法中) and among human beings (renzhong 人中) 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
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
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?” Merleau-
Ponty 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 non-
Western others while retaining a Hegelian framework through his conception
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,
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
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.
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
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
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,
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?
二裂銀杏葉
生著這種葉子的樹木，
從東方移進我的園庭；
它給你一個秘密啟示，
耐人尋味，令識者振奮。
它是一個有生命的物體，
在自己體內一分為二？
還是兩個生命合在一起，
被我們看成了一體？
也許我已找到正確答案，
來回答這樣一個問題：
你難道不感覺在我詩中，
我既是我，又是你和我？16
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).
262 Notes
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 On Western “constructions” of Confucianism, see Lionel M. Jensen, Manufacturing

Confucianism: Chinese Traditions & Universal Civilization (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1997).
2 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.
3 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.
4 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.
5 Herbert Fingarette, Confucius: The Secular as Sacred (Long Grove: Waveland Press,
1998).
6 Matthew Tindal, Christianity as Old as the Creation: Or, the Gospel, a Republication
of the Religion of Nature (London: [various], 1731), 342.
7 Friedrich Schleiermacher, Kritische Gesamtausgabe: Briefwechsel 1803–1804 (Briefe
1541–1830), Part 5, Vol. 7 (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 2005), 121–122.
8 Friedrich Schleiermacher, Kritische Gesamtausgabe: Briefwechsel, 1774–1796 (Briefe
1–326), Part 5, Vol. 1 (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 1986), 56.
Notes 263
9 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).
10 Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophie der Geschichte: In Achtzehn Vorlesungen Gehalten Zu
Wien im Jahre 1828 (Vienna: Schaumburg, 1829), 95–96.
11 Schlegel, Philosophie der Geschichte, 96.
12 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.
13 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.
14 G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011), 87.
15 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.
264 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
Notes 265
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.
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 吳宓 (ed.), Xueheng 學衡 (Critical Review) 1.1 (1922):
n.p.; on the Xueheng intellectuals, compare Sun Shangyang 孫尚揚 and Guo
Lanfang 郭蘭芳, Guogu xinzhi lun: Xueheng pai wenhua lunzhu jiyao 國故新知
論─學衡派文化論著輯要(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.
266 Notes
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.
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 267
Heaven has none to whom he can pray.” The Chinese text reads: “獲罪於天，無
所禱也。” Analects, 3:13.
63 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.
64 Buber, Eclipse of God, 37; Schriften zur Philosophie, 530.
65 Buber, Eclipse of God, 37; Schriften zur Philosophie, 530.
66 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics: The Doctrine of Creation, Vol. 3, Pt. 2: The Creature
(Edinburgh: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2004), 277.
67 Martin Buber, Between Man and Man (London: Routledge Classics, 2002), 264.
68 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.
69 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.
70 Jaspers, Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, 50.
72 Jaspers, Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, 48, 56–57.
74 Jaspers, Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, 43, 92–93.
78 Karl Jaspers, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Plotinus, Lao-Tzu, Nagarjuna,
trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966).
79 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 Notes
dem Einfluss von John Deweys (1859–1952) Pragmatismus (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner
Verlag, 2001).
2 Sun Yat-Sen, Sanmin zhuyi 三民主義 (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 anti-
cosmopolitanism is developed in Eric S. Nelson, “Fei duichen lunlixue yu shijie
gongmin zhuyi kuanrong beilun” 非對稱倫理學與世界公民主義寬容悖論. Jilin
Daxue shehui kexue xuebao 吉林大學社會科學學報 (Jilin University Journal Social
Sciences Edition) 3 (2014): 101–107.
3 Rudolf Eucken and Carsun Chang, Das Lebensproblem in China und Europa
(Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1922).
4 Eucken and Chang, Das Lebensproblem in China und Europa, 95; Analects, 15:29:
“子曰: 人能弘道、非道弘人.”
5 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).
6 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, Fern-
Ost als gäste Jungchinas (Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus, 1925), 223; Ming-huei Lee,
Konfuzianischer Humanismus: Transkulturelle Kontexte (Bielefeld: Transcript
Verlag, 2013), 58.
7 On Zhang’s initial encounter and impression of Eucken, see Zhang Junmai, “Xueshu
fangfa shang zhi guanjian” 學術方法上之管見 (My Humble Understanding of
Scholarly Methods). Gaizao 改造 (Reconstruction) 4.5 (1922): 1–9, and see p. 3.
8 Eucken, Lebenserinnerungen, 173–178; Eucken, His Life, Work and Travels, 93–97.
9 Eucken, Lebenserinnerungen, 173; Eucken, His Life, Work and Travels, 93–94.
10 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.
11 Eucken, Lebenserinnerungen, 195–196; Eucken, His Life, Work and Travels, 108.
12 Eucken, Lebenserinnerungen, 195–196; Eucken, His Life, Work and Travels, 108.
13 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?” Fichte-
Studien 35 (2010): 107–150.
14 Eucken, Lebenserinnerungen, 208–209; Eucken, His Life, Work and Travels,
116–117.
Notes 269
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” 倭伊鏗精神生活哲學大概 (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” 法
國哲學家柏格森談話記 (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 中西印哲學文集, Vol. 2, ed. Cheng
Wenxi 程文熙 (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.
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).
33 Eucken’s Letter to Zhang, translated as “Woyikeng shi fu Zhang Junmai shu” 倭伊
鏗氏覆張君勱書. 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” 歐洲文化之危機
及中國新文化之趨向 (The Crisis of European Culture and the Tendency of New
Culture in China). Dongfang zazhi 東方雜誌 (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 Notes
compare, Edmund S. K. Fung, The Intellectual Foundations of Chinese Modernity:

Cultural and Political Thought in the Republican Era (Cambridge: Cambridge
37 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” 德國哲學家杜里舒氏東來之報告及其學說大略.
Gaizao 4.6 (1921): 1–24; see also Zhang, Zhong Xi Yin zhexue wenji, 1124–1149.
38 Zhang, “Report on German Philosopher Driesch Coming to the East and Synopsis
of His Scholarship,” 12–13.
39 Compare Driesch and Driesch, Fern-Ost als gäste Jungchinas, 223.
40 Driesch and Driesch, Fern-Ost als gäste Jungchinas, 224.
42 Driesch and Driesch, Fern-Ost als gäste Jungchinas, 224–226.
45 Driesch and Driesch, Fern-Ost als gäste Jungchinas, 13; Hans Driesch, Grundprobleme
der Psychologie: Ihre Krisis in der Gegenwart (Leipzig: E. Reinicke, 1926), iii.
46 Hans Driesch, Relativitätstheorie und Philosophie (Karlsruhe: G. Braun, 1924), 1.
47 Hans Driesch, Aiyinsitan shi xiangduilun ji qi piping 愛因斯坦氏相對論及其批評
(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
49 Driesch and Driesch, Fern-Ost als gäste Jungchinas, 5; Hermann Keyserling, Das
Reisetagebuch Eines Philosophen, 2 Vols (Darmstadt: O. Reichl, 1919).
51 Margarete Driesch, Frauen Jenseits Der Ozeane: Unter Mitwirkung Fürhrender
Zeitgenossen Aus Jenen Ländern (Heidelberg: N. Kampmann, 1928).
52 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.
53 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 271
der Juden in Deutschland (Morning: Monthly of the Jews in Germany) published

from 1925 to 1938.
54 See Frank Dikötter, The Construction of Racial Identities in China and Japan:
History and Contemporary Perspectives (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press,
1997). 22.
55 Zhang Junmai, Minzu fuxing zhi xueshu jichu 民族復興之學術基礎 (The Scientific
Foundations for National Revival) (Beijing: Zaishengshe, 1935), 10, 22, 34; Zhang
Junmai, Mingri zhi Zhongguo wenhua 明日之中國文化 (The Chinese Culture of
Tomorrow) (Beijing: Zhongguo renmin daxue chubanshe, 1936).
56 Harrington, Reenchanted Science, 190.
58 Driesch and Driesch, Fern-Ost als gäste Jungchinas, 20–21, 30–31.
61 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).
62 Hermann von Samson-Himmelstjerna, Die Gelbe Gefahr als Moralproblem (Berlin:
Deutscher Kolonial-Verlag, 1902).
63 Christian von Ehrenfels, Sexualethik (Wiesbaden: J.F. Bergmann, 1907), 88;
Christian von Ehrenfels, “Die gelbe Gefahr.” Sexual-Probleme 4 (1908): 185–205.
64 Emmanuel Levinas, Unforeseen History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
2004), 108.
65 Richard Wilhelm, Die Seele Chinas (Berlin: R. Hobbing, 1926). Translation: Richard
Wilhelm, The Soul of China (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1928).
66 Driesch and Driesch, Fern-Ost als gäste Jungchinas, 20–21, 39.
67 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.
68 Wertheim, Salvation Through Spinoza, 34.
69 Driesch, “Können Rassen einander Verstehen?,” 669.
70 Driesch, “Können Rassen einander Verstehen?,” 670–671.
71 Driesch, “Können Rassen einander Verstehen?,” 670.
74 Driesch and Driesch, Fern-Ost als gäste Jungchinas, 35, 39.
76 Driesch and Driesch, Fern-Ost als gäste Jungchinas, 37–38, 162.
272 Notes

85 Driesch and Driesch, Fern-Ost als gäste Jungchinas, 305; Driesch, Die Sittliche Tat,
146.
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 Lao-
Zhuang 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).
Notes 273
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” 我之哲學思想 (My Philosophical
Thoughts). Zhong Xi Yin zhexue wenji 1, 37–62. It was originally published in the
journal Zaisheng 再生 4.17 (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 李明輝, Kangde zhexue zai xiandai Zhongguo 康德哲學在現
代中國(Kant’s Philosophy in Modern China), in Li, Kangde zhexue zai Dongya 康
德哲學在東亞 (Kant’s Philosophy in East Asia) (Taipei: guoli Taiwan daxue chuban
zhongxin, 2016), 5.
117 Zhang, “My Philosophical Thoughts,” 44–45.
274 Notes

123 [Zhang Junmai] Carsun Chang, The Development of Neo-Confucian Thought: Vol. 1
(London: Vision, 1958), 15.
124 Mou Zongsan, Wushi zishu 五十自述 (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 New-
Confucianism 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.”
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).
Notes 275
Chapter 3
1 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/.
2 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.
3 Strawson, “Freedom and Resentment,” 14–15.
4 Strawson, “Freedom and Resentment,” 24–25.
5 Strawson, “Freedom and Resentment,” 9.
6 Max Scheler, Ressentiment (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1994), 48.
7 Scheler, Ressentiment, 72–73.
8 Max Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, trans. Peter Heath (Hamden: Archon Books,
1970), 100.
9 Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, 100.
10 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J.
Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), I.1. KSA 5, 257.
11 Compare Chiu-yee Cheung, Lu Xun, The Chinese “gentle” Nietzsche (Frankfurt:
Lang, 2001), 45.
12 Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, I.10. KSA 5, 270.
13 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.
14 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), vii, 5.
Nietzsche, KSA 6, 102.
276 Notes
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.
Notes 277
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 怨 in
Early Confucian Thought.” Dao 15.1 (2016): 19–33.
38 Shixing deli wei zhi de, fan de wei yuan 施行得理謂之德, 反德爲怨; Xingguo
Wang, Jia Yi pingzhuan 賈誼評傳 (Nanjing: 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.
278 Notes
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.
Notes 279
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.
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:
280 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.
12 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.
13 Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, 45–46.
16 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.
17 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.
18 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.
19 Maurice S. Friedman, Martin Buber: The Life of Dialogue (London: Routledge,
2002), 31.
20 Martin Buber, Chinesische Geister- und Liebesgeschichten (Frankfurt: Rütten und
Loening, 1911). Published in English in Buber, Chinese Tales.
21 Herman, I and Tao, 73.
23 Herman, I and Tao, 70–72, 76.
24 Friedman, Martin Buber, 32.
25 Compare Friedman, Martin Buber, 33.
26 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.
27 Compare Friedman, Martin Buber, 33.
Notes 281
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.
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.
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.
282 Notes
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.
Notes 283
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.
284 Notes
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.
Notes 285
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.
38 Misch, Der Weg in die Philosophie, 14; The Dawn of Philosophy, 16.
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.
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.
47 Misch, The Dawn of Philosophy, 184–187.
48 Misch, Lebensphilosophie und Phanomenologie, 14.
286 Notes

50 Misch, Lebensphilosophie und Phanomenologie, 47.
53 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.
55 Compare Misch, Lebensphilosophie und Phanomenologie, 317.
56 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
57 Compare Misch, Der Weg in die Philosophie, 221, 229; The Dawn of Philosophy, 202.
58 Misch, Der Weg in die Philosophie, 221.
59 Misch, Lebensphilosophie und Phanomenologie, 89–90.
60 Chung-ying Cheng, New Dimensions of Confucian and Neo-Confucian Philosophy
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 39.
61 Yang Chengyin 楊成寅, Cheng Zhongying taiji chuang hua lun 成中英太極創化
論 (Chung-ying Cheng’s Taichai Creation Theory) (Hangzhou: Zhejiang University
Press, 2012).
62 On Hegel’s misinterpretation of the Yijing and his critique of Chinese “image-
thinking,” 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. Pang-
White (ed.), The Bloomsbury Research Handbook to Chinese Philosophy and Gender
(London: Bloomsbury Press, 2016), 267–288.
63 For instance, “《易》者，象也；象也者，像也。” Xici 系辞 II:3.
64 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.
65 Cheng, New Dimensions of Confucian and Neo-Confucian Philosophy, 39.
66 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.
67 Chung-ying Cheng, “The Origins of Chinese Philosophy,” in Brian Carr and
Indira Mahalingam (eds.), Companion Encyclopedia of Asian Philosophy (London:
Notes 287
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).
68 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.
69 Robert F. Campany, “Xunzi and Durkheim as Theorists of Ritual Practice,” in Frank
Reynolds and David Tracy (eds.), Discourse and Practice (Albany: State University
70 Fabrizio Pregadio, Encyclopedia of Taoism, Volume 1 (London: Routledge, 2005), 1086.
71 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.
72 Compare Cheng, New Dimensions of Confucian and Neo-Confucian Philosophy, 82.
Also compare Nelson, “Generativities,” 100.
73 See, for example, “《易》曰: 宓戲氏仰觀象於天，俯觀法於地，觀鳥獸之文，
與地之宜，近取諸身，遠取諸物，於是始作八卦，以通神明之德，以類萬
物之情。 ” Liu, Zhaoyou 劉兆祐, Zhongguo mulu xue 中國目錄學 (The Study of
Chinese Bibliography) (Taibei Shi: Wu nan tu shu chu ban gong si, 2002), 32.
74 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.
75 Cheng, New Dimensions of Confucian and Neo-Confucian Philosophy, 171; “On the
Metaphysical Significance of Ti (Body–Embodiment) in Chinese Philosophy,” 148.
76 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.
77 As Lin Ma demonstrated in her significant and useful study Heidegger on East-West
Dialogue.
78 Plessner, Macht und menschliche Natur, 162–163.
79 Plessner, Macht und menschliche Natur, 164, 185.
80 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.
288 Notes
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.
Notes 289
11 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University
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
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
290 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).
20 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 王國維, Wang Guowei ji 王國維集 (Works of Wang Guowei)
(Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 2008), vol.2.
21 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.
22 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).
23 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.
24 Carl Friedrich Köppen, Die Religion des Buddha. Vol. 1. Die Religion des Buddha
und ihre Entstehung (Berlin: F. Schneider, 1857).
25 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.
26 Karl Jaspers, Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus: The Paradigmatic Individuals
(New York: Harcourt, 1962).
27 See Luft, “Sokrates-Buddha,” 1, 2.
28 For instance, Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Texte aus
dem Nachlass (1973), 241.
29 Luft, “Sokrates-Buddha,” 5.
33 Luft, “Sokrates-Buddha,” 5; also compare the careful discussion of this text in Lau,
Phenomenology and Intercultural Understanding, 59–64.
34 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.
Notes 291
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.
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.
292 Notes
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.
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 293
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 Hans-
Jörg Rheinberger (eds.), Science and the Life-World: Essays on Husserl’s Crisis of
European Sciences (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010).
70 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (London: Penguin, 2002).
71 Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, 270. Also note Jacques Derrida, Rogues:
Two Essays on Reason (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 125.
72 Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, 269.
74 Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, 271, 299.
76 Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, 271, 272.
79 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.
82 Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, 210, 299; Hans Driesch and Margarete
Driesch, Fern-Ost als gäste Jungchinas (Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus, 1925), 302.
86 Franz Rosenzweig, Der Mensch und Sein Werk: Briefe und Tagebücher (Dordrecht
Springer, 2013), 768.
87 Rosenzweig, Der Mensch und Sein Werk, 767, 768.
93 Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, 290. Compare Jacques Derrida, Heidegger:
The Question of Being and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 123.
96 See Gasché, Europe, or the Infinite Task; Philippe Nemo, What Is the West?
(Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2006).
294 Notes
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.
100 Compare Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2 (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1984), 119–139.
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.
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
107 Compare the editorial description to Edmund Husserl, Husserliana XXXV: Einleitung
in die Philosophie: Vorlesungen 1922/23 (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2003), 721.
109 Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, 279–280.
112 Compare Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, 282–283.
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.
Notes 295
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.
296 Notes
136 Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 2.
137 Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics and Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge
138 Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics and Criticism, 21, 22.
Chapter 7
1 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.
2 On Buber’s understanding of Asian philosophy, see Friedman, “Martin Buber and
Asia,” 411–426.
3 Buber, Hasidism, 188.
5 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.
6 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.
7 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.
Notes 297
8 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.
9 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced
Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon, 1964), 13–14.
10 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).
11 Jürgen Habermas, Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1970).
12 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).
13 Charles W. Morris, Writings on the General Theory of Signs (Berlin: De Gruyter,
1971), 457.
14 Sidney Hook, “But There Was No Light.” New York Times, “Books” (March 5, 1961).
15 Hook, “But There Was No Light.”
16 Hook, “But There Was No Light.”
17 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).
18 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.
19 Erich Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 67.
20 Carl Jung, Letters of C. G. Jung, Volume 2; Volumes 1951–1961 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1991), 602.
21 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.
298 Notes
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.
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 Buber-
Scholem 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
Notes 299
Garrett and Sarah Mattice (eds.), Levinas and Asian Thought (Pittsburgh: Duquesne
University Press, 2013), 99–114.
38 Levinas, Unforeseen History, 108. Compare Nelson, “Levinas and Early Confucian
Ethics,” 177–178.
39 Jill Robbins, Is It Righteous to Be?: Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2001), 149.
40 Emmanuel Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1990), 176.
41 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.
42 Compare Ben-Yosef, “Confucianism and Taoism in The Star of Redemption,” 25–36.
43 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.
44 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.
45 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.
46 Martin Buber, Hasidism and Modern Man (New York: Horizon Press, 1958), 254;
Pointing the Way, ix–x; “One Should Follow the Common,” 107–108.
300 Notes
48 Raphael Jehudah Zwi Werblowsky, Beyond Tradition and Modernity: Changing

Religions in a Changing World (London: Athlone Press, 1976), 115.
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 景德傳燈錄 (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.
63 Translation modified Buber, Hasidism, 186.
64 Yuan ren lun 原人論, 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.
Notes 301
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 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.
2 Huangbo, Essentials of the Transmission of Mind (Huangbo shan Duanji chanshi
chuanxin fayao 黃檗山斷際禪師傳心法要: T48 N2012A 380c02-c03; T48 N2012A:
381c15.
3 Huangbo, T48 N2012A: 381c07; T48 N2012A: 381c01.
4 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).
5 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.
6 McRae, Seeing through Zen, 90, 91.
7 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 Notes
8 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 Nothingness-
Samadhi 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.
9 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.
10 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).
11 Compare Ma, Heidegger on East-West Dialogue, 183.
12 Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1983), 96.
13 Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, 96.
14 Kōichi Tsujimura, “Martin Heideggers Denken und die Japanische Philosophie,” in
Buchner, Japan und Heidegger, 165.
15 Ta Hui (Dahui), Swampland Flowers, trans. J. C. Cleary (Boston: Shambhala, 2006), 57.
16 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.
17 GA 27, 2, 3.
18 GA 27, 4 and 6.
19 GA 27, 11.
20 GA 27, 12
21 GA 27, 331–338.
22 GA 27, 191.
23 T48 N2012A: 381a21-22; Huangbo, “Essentials of the Transmission of Mind,” trans.
J. R. McRae, in Zen Texts (Berkeley: Numata Center, 2005), 21.
24 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge, 1983),
Proposition 7.
Notes 303
25 Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 6.41–6.42.

26 Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 6.42–6.421.
27 Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 6.522.
28 Rudolf Carnap, The Logical Structure of the World and Pseudoproblems in
Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 297.
29 Rudolf Carnap, Scheinprobleme in der Philosophie und andere metaphysikkritische
Schriften (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2004), 81, 103.
30 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).
31 Rudolf Carnap, “Überwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Analyse
der Sprache,” in Carnap, Scheinprobleme in der Philosophie und andere
metaphysikkritische Schriften, 81, 103.
32 Carnap, “Überwindung der Metaphysik,” 95.
33 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.
34 Compare Carter, “God and Nothingness,” 1–21.
35 Martin Heidegger, Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998), 94. PM citations are to the pagination of the English translation.
36 PM, 84.
37 Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. G. Fried and R. Polt (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 18–21.
38 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.
39 PM, 290.
40 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.
41 PM, 238.
42 T51 N2076 0457c07.
43 On the Western reception and interpretation of Buddhism as nihilism, see Roger-
Pol Droit, The Cult of Nothingness: The Philosophers and the Buddha (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
44 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.
304 Notes
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 305

74 Welter, The Linji lu and the Creation of Chan Orthodoxy, 148, 149.
75 Welter, Monks, Rulers, and Literati, 120, 121, 165.
76 McRae, Seeing through Zen, 92, 93, 132.
77 Linji, Zen Teachings, 50.
78 T47 N1985: 498c27; See Heine, Opening a Mountain, cases 13–15.
79 See Zhenzhou Linji Huizhao chanshi yulu 鎮州臨濟慧照禪師語錄, 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.
91 Welter, Monks, Rulers, and Literati, 18, 19.
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
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 Notes
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.
109 Yuanwu, Zen Letters, 99.
110 Yuanwu, Zen Letters, 32, 33, 38, 39.
112 Foulk, “The Form and Function of Kōan Literature,” 41.
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.
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.
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.
130 Dahui, Swampland Flowers, 42, 64, 77.
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.
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.
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).
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.
165 Huineng, The Platform Sutra, 166, 172.
167 Dahui, Swampland Flowers, 116; Yuanwu, Zen Letters, 49.
308 Notes
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 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Everywhere and Nowhere,” in Merleau-Ponty,

Signs (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 126–159.Merleau-
Ponty 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.
2 Merleau-Ponty, “Everywhere and Nowhere,” 127.
3 Merleau-Ponty, “Everywhere and Nowhere,” 133.
4 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.
5 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.
6 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 309
7 Rudolf A. Makkreel, Orientation and Judgment in Hermeneutics (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 2015).
8 Makkreel, Orientation and Judgment in Hermeneutics, 52.
9 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).
10 Martin Heidegger, “From a Dialogue on Language,” in Heidegger, On the Way to
Language (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 1–56.
11 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).
12 Dongming Zhao traces how the learning of the heart-mind (xinxue 心學)
articulated by Lu Xiangshan (陸象山) and Wang Yangming (王陽明) operates
as a discourse of the infinite performatively enacting and embodying irreducibly
ethical principles (tianli 天理), 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.
13 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.
14 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).
15 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: Bi-
lingual 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.
16 For the Chinese translation, see Gede 歌德 [Johann Wolfgang von Goethe], tr.
Yang Wuneng 楊武能, Gede shuqing shi xuancui 歌德抒情詩選萃 (Selection of
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Index
Note: The letter “n” following locators refers to notes.
Adorno, Theodor W. 76, 204–7, 215, 296 beginning 31, 132–3, 137–8, 142–7,
n.7 151–3, 155–6, 192–4, 203. See also
affect origin
affective language 9, 116, 128 beginning of philosophy 31, 132–3,
ethical affect 53, 87, 94, 98, 101, 106, 144, 146, 193–4
145 first and other beginning (der erste und
reactive affect 77–8, 82, 85, 88–92, der andere Anfang) 137–8, 142, 155,
96–7, 105 192–4, 203
Alexander the Great 28, 84 Bell, Daniel 208
Al-Kindī, Abu Yūsuf Ya‘qūb ibn ’Isḥāq aṣ- Bell, Daniel A. 107
Ṣabbāḥ 1, 4–5 Bellow, Saul 5, 262 n.11
alterity 60, 82–3, 88, 93, 96, 141, 155, 161, Benjamin, Walter 26
181, 198, 206, 258 Berdyaev, Nikolai 68
Americanism 45, 192–3, 195 Bergson, Henri 7, 49, 51–2, 55, 69–70, 72–3
Ammon, Otto 28 Besinnung (contemplation, reflection,
Analects (Lunyu 論語) 8, 13, 15, 19, thoughtfulness) 140, 146, 148, 254
37–9, 41, 47, 66–7, 73, 87–101, 103, Bhikkhu Maha Mani 175, 195
106–7, 145 Bilfinger, Georg Bernhard 16, 19
and moral psychology 87–101, 103, Bodhidharma (菩提達摩) 234, 241
106–7 body/embodiment 30, 73, 153, 155, 162–3,
animal 68, 116, 125, 220, 224 209, 238, 245
anti-Semitism 24–5, 61–2, 64, 214 Bolshevism. See communism
Arendt, Hannah 38 Bonaparte, Napoleon 84
Aristotle 59, 131, 189 Book of Odes (Shijing 詩經) 102
Ast, Friedrich 13, 21 Book of Rites (Liji 禮記) 102
asymmetry Brecht, Bertolt 26, 66
asymmetrical ethics 8, 17, 83, 88–9, Brentano, Franz 60, 161
92–3, 96–101, 104, 106–8, 163, 186, Buber, Martin 3, 7–10, 14–16, 26, 33,
226 35–7, 39–41, 47, 66, 109–11,
asymmetrical power relations 5, 40, 43, 113–21, 124–9, 138, 145, 170,
46, 64, 108, 265 n.46 201–3, 209–20, 224
atheism 16, 19, 37, 50, 63, 112–14, 145, and the Buddha 212
166–7, 239 and Chan/Zen Buddhism 201–3,
Augustine 231 209–20, 224
autobiography/biography viii, 31–2, and Confucianism 35–7, 39–41, 145
131–3, 147, 215, 282 n.1 and contact 120, 184, 214, 217
autonomy 16, 29, 35–6, 52, 54, 76, 101, and Daoism 109–11, 113–21, 124–9
166–7, 170–1, 176, 179, 238 and Hasidism 9–10, 115–17, 127–8,
203, 209–10, 212–14, 216, 298 n.29
Baeck, Leo 68 and I-Thou (ich–Du) 37, 202, 210–12,
Baizhang (百丈) 226, 234 216–19, 221
Barth, Karl 37 and parable 9, 116, 119, 125, 127–8
Index 337
and teaching (Lehre) 9, 115–17, 125, Classic of Familial Reverence (Xiaojing 孝

127, 209 經) 101
and Zionism 214, 299 n.44 “coldness” 22, 26, 28
Buddha (Siddhārtha Gautama) 1, 28, 32, colonialism 5–6, 13, 29, 40, 43–6, 53,
34, 39, 48, 59, 85, 142, 165–70, 58–60, 181–2, 207
172–3, 175, 182, 190, 211–12 and cosmopolitanism 45–6, 181
Buddhism 4–6, 9–10, 23, 25, 46, 48–9, 63, communism 30, 52, 57, 60, 71, 76, 136,
72, 74, 81, 85, 94, 99, 112, 114, 150, 206, 213, 299 n.41
159–60, 162, 164–70, 172–6, 179, community 20, 31, 39, 53, 62, 65, 67, 94,
187–9, 196, 211, 217, 234. See also 125, 150, 185, 214–15, 255
Chan/Zen Buddhism conceptual thinking 5–6, 22, 34, 137, 152,
Madhyamaka 211, 234 225, 253
Yogācāra 162 Confucianism (rujia 儒家) 4, 6–8, 13–20,
22–41, 43–50, 52–5, 61, 63–5,
Caesar, Julius 28 67–77, 81, 83, 87–108, 112–14, 116,
Cairns, Dorion 172–3, 184 119–20, 132, 144–6, 148–51, 159,
capitalism 23, 29, 54, 59, 76, 207 166, 202, 216, 218, 222, 224, 258
Carnap, Rudolf 56, 229–32, 235, 237, 252 and de (德, virtue, justice) 45, 47
and nothing 229–32, 235, 237, 252 and junzi (君子, exemplary or noble
Chamberlain, Houston Stewart 28 person) 8, 17, 88–9, 91, 95–7, 99,
Chan/Zen (禪) Buddhism 10–11, 34, 69, 104, 106
114, 127, 134, 136, 156–7, 175, and li (禮, ritual, ritual propriety) 8, 17,
197, 201–10, 212, 215–28, 232–4, 45, 75, 89, 102
236–52. See also Buddhism and ren (仁, benevolence,
as antinomian 221–3, 226, 232, 236 humaneness) 8, 17, 37–9, 72, 81, 89,
and desacralization 233–4, 238–9, 244 91, 93–5, 97, 100, 224
and emptiness 202, 211–13, 217, and shu (恕, reciprocity, mutuality) 17,
222–3, 225, 227–8, 232–5, 238–52 40, 89, 98, 104
as ethos 218–24 and xiaoren (小人, ignoble/petty
and gong’an/kōan (公案) 219, 226, person) 88, 93, 95–7, 99
234–5, 239, 243, 245 and yuan (怨, resent) 92, 94–5, 97,
and Hongzhou lineage (洪州宗) 217, 99–100, 103
222–3, 226, 233–4, 236, 239–40, Confucius (Kongzi 孔子) 7, 9, 13–19, 22,
243, 247, 250 24–33, 36–9, 43, 65–6, 71–5, 84–6,
and paradox 10–11, 202, 207, 216, 234, 88, 92, 94–7, 100, 102–3, 105–6,
237, 242, 244–5, 250 112–13, 138, 144–5, 150, 166
as performative 223, 237–8, 241–2 as “Chinese Socrates” 27, 75
Chang, Carsun. See Zhang, Junmai cosmopolitanism 2, 4, 28–9, 44–6, 57–8,
Cheng, Chung-ying (成中英) 151 62, 65, 69, 107, 164, 170, 180–1,
Chinese Communist Party (CCP, 183, 185–6, 191, 214
Zhongguo gongchandang 中國共產 crisis 33, 44–5, 48, 54, 170–1, 177–8, 182,
黨) 57, 71 186–7
Chinese language 22, 26, 62–3, 152 critique
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT, critical exemplary model 1, 29, 41, 90,
Zhongguo guomindang 中國國民 99, 254
黨) 57, 71 critique of the Eurocentric conception
Christianity 15, 18, 20–3, 25, 27–8, 35, of reason 3, 11, 43, 131, 257–9
37, 49–50, 54, 63, 65, 80–1, 84–5, cultivation 8, 17, 29–30, 32, 47, 53, 72,
140–1, 149–50, 165, 168, 173–4, 88–9, 97–104, 129, 132, 145, 149,
182, 196, 209–11, 213–14, 221, 231, 220–2
233–4, 241
338 Index
Dahui (大慧) 228, 243–6 Einstein, Albert 28, 56, 73, 171
Daodejing (道德經) 36, 110–11, 113–17, Eizik, Rabbi 215–16
120–3, 125, 134, 149, 266 n.60 emptiness 3, 10–11, 114, 122–3, 125, 134,
Daoism (daojia 道家) 3–4, 6, 8–10, 23, 34, 157, 160, 165, 174–5, 202, 211–13,
36, 46, 63, 67, 70, 81, 99, 110–29, 217, 222–3, 225, 227–8, 232–5,
134, 136, 149–51, 156–7, 159–60, 238–52, 257. See also nothingness
174–5, 195, 202–3, 205, 209–12, as emptying 10, 211, 222–3, 235, 238,
214–16, 218, 222, 224, 226–7, 235, 240, 242–3, 247–9, 251, 284 n.29,
251–2 302 n.8
as “atheistic” and “materialist” 111–14 Enlightenment 14–15, 27–8, 32, 34, 43,
and daojiao (道敎, “Daoism”) 115 45, 54–5, 71–2, 144–5, 166–7, 169,
and wuwei (無爲, non–action, non– 177, 187
coercive letting) 117–20, 125, 136, Epicurus 113
202, 251 equality 25, 54, 71, 79–80, 83–5, 96, 108,
and ziran (自然, nature, spontaneity) 149
125 ethical life (Sittlichkeit) 29, 77–9, 86, 100,
Darwin, Charles 52 257
Darwinism 56, 59–60 ethnocentrism 2–5, 13, 40, 61, 68, 107,
de Beauvoir, Simone 3 141–3, 151, 156, 180–1, 184, 186,
Deism 16, 18, 113 188, 190, 199, 212, 259
democracy 25, 45, 54–5, 57, 70–1, 74, 81 ethos 16, 23, 25, 29, 37–8, 81, 102, 116,
social democracy 25, 55, 57, 70–1 127, 165–6, 171, 201, 206–7,
Dennett, Daniel 160 218–24
Derrida, Jacques 34, 43, 135, 137–8, 140, Eucken, Rudolf 7, 16, 33, 44, 47–55, 57–8,
156, 190–1, 195, 204 65, 69–73, 76, 79, 81, 101, 105
Descartes, René 51, 161, 170–1, 173, 253 and activist Idealism 47–51
Dewey, John 55–6, 171–2, 206–7 and spiritual life 47, 52, 54
Diderot, Denis 27 Eurocentrism 3, 5, 11, 13, 18, 43, 110,
Dilthey, Wilhelm 9, 15, 30–3, 79, 125, 129, 138, 140, 145, 160, 164, 176,
132–3, 138–41, 146, 148–50, 156–7, 179–86, 190–1, 199, 202, 207, 213,
213, 231, 254–5 252, 257–9
and worldview 125, 138–40, 148–9, exoticism 21, 205, 213, 215, 296 n.7
254–5
Ding Wenjiang (丁文江) 69–70, 72, 272 facticity 79–80, 131–3, 161–2, 179, 199,
n.101 248–9
Diotima of Mantinea 199 feeling of life (Lebensgefühl) 115, 143, 157,
Dōgen (道元) 5, 218, 220–1, 250 231, 254
Driesch, Hans 7, 16, 33, 44, 47, 50, 55–70, Fenollosa, Ernest 26
76, 87, 170, 180, 185–6, 259 Feuerbach, Ludwig 37
and China 55–70 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 48, 64
and criticism of anti–Semitism 61–4 Fingarette, Herbert 15
and critique of racial theory 57–62 Fink, Eugen 172–4
and “good European” (gute Europäer) first-person perspective 77–8, 82, 94, 133,
63–4, 180 160–2, 275 n.2
and opposition to National Socialism Flanagan, Owen 94, 106, 275 n.2
57–61 Freud, Sigmund 178, 208
Driesch, Margarete 56–7, 59–60, 62 Fromm, Erich 207–8
Eckhart, Meister 251 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 67, 131, 255

Ehrenfels, Christian von 60 Gihwa (己和) 1–2, 5, 222, 224
Index 339
Giles, Herbert Allen 114 and people (Volk) 134–5, 148, 192–4
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 28, 59, 67, and poetic thinking 124, 127, 129, 137,
259–60 141–2, 195
“good European” (gute Europäer) 63–4, Heraclitus 18, 253
180, 190 hermeneutical situation 29, 32, 40, 138,
Great Learning (Daxue 大學) 41, 97 140, 147, 151, 234, 252
Gu Jiegang (顧頡剛) 45 hermeneutics 1, 6, 9, 11, 18, 21, 25–6, 29–
30, 32–3, 40–1, 47, 65, 82, 109–10,
Habermas, Jürgen 3, 43, 51, 83, 185–7, 131–2, 138–42, 144, 146–7, 149–54,
206, 255, 257–8 157, 159, 163, 179, 184, 186, 198–9,
Haeckel, Ernst 62 201–2, 212–13, 215, 219, 224, 227,
Hallo, Rudolf 182 234, 252, 255–6, 258–9
Hammerdörfer, Karl 113 intercultural hermeneutics 1, 9, 18,
Hasidism 9–10, 115–17, 127–8, 203, 25–6, 30, 32, 40–1, 65, 144, 151,
209–10, 212–14, 216, 298 n.29 159, 184, 198–9, 201–2, 215, 224,
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 2–5, 7, 252, 256, 258
13, 15–16, 19–22, 24, 27, 31, 33–4, Herrigel, Eugen 69, 208, 297 n.21
38, 41, 48, 52–3, 55, 64, 86, 90, 109, Hess, Moses 299 n.43
111, 113, 135, 137, 141, 143–4, hierarchy 22, 36, 58, 83, 106, 212, 257
146–7, 151–3, 156, 160, 165, 182, Hinduism 23, 64–5, 150, 207, 210, 216
187, 191, 201, 203, 212–13, 253, Hisamatsu Shin’ichi (久松真一) 302 n.8
255, 257, 259 history
Heidegger, Martin 3, 6, 8–11, 17, 33–4, Chinese history 19, 21, 36
38–9, 43, 50, 60, 69, 109–11, 114, historicity (Geschichtlichkeit) 131, 133,
118, 121–9, 131–41, 143–8, 151, 139, 156, 181
153–7, 159–60, 162–4, 170, 174–6, historiography 21, 133, 139–40, 226–7
179–80, 187–8, 191–9, 201–5, 209, history of spirit 21–5, 180, 193, 214
212, 214–15, 223, 225, 227–40, philosophy of history 21, 38, 132–3,
242–52, 256 137, 141, 144, 146, 176, 178, 180,
and “Asiatic” 60, 135–7 182–7, 191, 213, 249, 252, 257
and being (Sein) 122–3, 133, 139–40, Hitler, Adolf 68
145, 157, 163, 175, 191–2, 225, 228, Hölderlin, Friedrich 123, 135–6, 192
251 holy 122, 218, 244
and decision (Entscheidung) 135, 139, Hongren (弘忍) 234
175, 191, 194 Honneth, Axel 83
and enframing (Ge-stell) 126, 136, 144, Hook, Sidney 202, 207–8
203 Horkheimer, Max 49, 53
and event (Ereignis) 133, 140, 146, 157, Hsiao Shih-yi. See Xiao Shiyi 蕭師毅
197, 228, 250, 252 Huangbo (黄檗) 229, 234, 241, 243, 245,
and formal indication (formale 247
Anzeige) 10, 140, 248–51 Huineng (惠能) 223, 245–7
and the fourfold (Geviert) 123, 129, Hu Shi (胡適) 45, 66, 69
192 Husserl, Edmund 2, 9–10, 34, 38, 43,
and iki (いき) 196–7 51, 72, 135, 140, 159–64, 167–73,
and Japan 10, 134, 159, 196–8, 203–4, 175–91, 194–6, 198–9, 202, 257–8
252, 256 and the Buddha 167–71
and letting, release (Gelassenheit) 122, and crisis 170–1, 177–8, 182, 186–7
124–5, 136, 163, 248–9, 251 and epochè (reduction) 161, 172–4
and ontological difference 122–3, and Europe and Eurocentrism 164,
139–40, 153 176, 179–86, 190–1, 199
340 Index
and intentionality 161–2, 173 Jugendstil (Art Nouveau) 66

and Japan 164, 171–2, 179, 181 Jung, Carl 44, 64, 66, 68, 207–8, 225, 237
and Papuan 181, 183, 187 and Weimar era reception of Chinese
and renewal 164, 168, 170–2, 179, 183, thought 44, 64, 66, 68
194 and Zen Buddhism 207–8, 225, 237
and Socrates 167, 169–71, 198–9 Justi, Heinrich Gottlob 14, 16, 19
and transcendental 161–4, 167–70, justice 41, 47, 78, 90, 92, 97, 211, 258
172–3, 188, 191
Kafka, Franz 26
iconoclasm 30 45, 55, 226, 234, 238 Kaizō (改造, Renewal) 163, 171–2, 176–7
and Chan/Zen Buddhism 226, 234, 238 Kant, Immanuel 5, 7, 16, 19–21, 27, 41,
and May Fourth Movement 30, 45, 55 44, 48, 52, 54–6, 65–7, 70–6, 79, 94,
idealism 7–8, 21, 24, 35, 44, 48–9, 51, 53, 109, 111–13, 133, 160–1, 166, 170,
55–7, 64, 67, 69–71, 76, 160–1, 166 172, 190, 217, 254–5
activist idealism 44, 48, 51, 53, 71 Keyserling, Hermann Graf 44, 57, 64, 66,
German idealism 24, 49, 51, 55, 64, 67, 68–9, 110, 170, 186
69–70, 76 Kierkegaard, Søren Aabye 80
transcendental idealism 160–1 King Hui of Liang (Liang Hui Wang 梁惠
imagistic and pictorial thinking 22, 152–4 王) 34,106
imperialism 59 Klages, Ludwig 48
India 4, 6, 9, 20, 23–4, 26, 31, 34, 38, 54, Klemm, Gustav Friedrich 28
64–5, 68, 71, 85, 112, 133–4, 140–1, Koestler, Arthur 60, 202, 206–8, 218
143–4, 148, 150, 157, 167–8, 172–3, Köppen, Karl Friedrich 166
175–6, 180–2, 187–9, 194–5, 206–7, Kristeva, Julia 3, 261 n.4
210, 213, 216–17, 228 Kroll, Frank-Lothar 69
Indian philosophy 134, 150, 167–8, Kuki Shūzō (九鬼周造) 196–7
172, 176, 188 Kyōto School (Kyōto–gakuha 京都學派)
ineffability 116, 141, 198 176, 211, 219, 227
intertextuality 1–3, 5–6, 8, 41, 74, 110,
121, 126, 145, 165, 197, 199, 225, Laozi (老子) 8, 29, 37, 39, 63, 81, 110–13,
227, 231, 256, 258 115, 117, 119–20, 123–4, 126–7,
intuition 10, 44, 46, 59, 74–6, 147, 226–8, 211, 253
242 Layman Pang (Pang Yun 龐蘊) 244
Islam 4, 19–20, 23–4, 26, 31, 63, 65, 187, League for Human Rights (Liga für
189 Menschenrechte) 58, 67
legalism (fajia 法家) 149–50
James, William 51–2 Legge, James 114
Jaspers, Karl 7, 16, 31–2, 37–40, 112, 167 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 7, 14–16, 19,
and “axial age” (Achsenzeit) 31, 37 50, 59, 62, 65, 109–11, 141, 145,
and Buddhism 167 201–2, 213, 232–3
and Confucianism 37–40, 267 n.68 and “exchange of light” 14, 65, 170, 202
and Daoism 112 and the nothing 232–3, 303 n.40
and the encompassing (das Lessing, Theodor 44, 58, 66–7, 110, 170
Umgreifende) 38–9 “levelling” 20, 25–6, 85, 124
Jeong Dojeon (鄭道傳) 222 Levinas, Emmanuel 26, 60, 138, 156,
Jesus 15–16, 28, 32, 38–9 163–4, 180, 195, 209, 213, 215, 248,
Jiang Baili (蔣百里) 47 284 n.22
Jia Yi (賈誼) 94 and “yellow peril” 60, 180, 213
Judaism 10, 24–5, 115–17, 201, 203, Liang Qichao (梁啟超) 47, 55
209–10, 213–16 Liang Shuming (梁漱溟) 54
Index 341
Liezi (列子) 117 and the Buddha 34, 169

life-philosophy (Lebensphilosophie; and Confucianism 30–4
shengming zhexue 生命哲學) 7, 33, and Zhuangzi 142–3, 149–51
44–5, 47–52, 55–6, 70–2, 74, 132, modernity 2, 8, 21, 23, 25, 43–5, 47–8, 55,
138, 140, 142, 144, 150, 230, 236 70, 118, 126–9, 136, 191–2, 203–4
lifeworld (Lebenswelt) 43, 51, 73, 86–7, Mohamed 32
93–4, 102, 162, 171, 178–80, 183–7, Mohism (Mojia 墨家) 149–50
190, 194, 255–8 monotheism 24–5, 84, 114, 145, 210–11,
decolonizing and pluralizing the 213
lifeworld 43, 180, 184, 187, 257 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat
Linji (臨濟) 223, 226, 234, 236, 238–40, 3, 19, 26, 263 n.12
245, 247–50 mood 116, 125, 128, 157, 235
and “killing the Buddha” (feng fo sha fo moral personality 16, 30, 88, 111, 114,
逢佛殺佛) 223, 238, 245 143–4, 148–9
Logos (λόγος) 124, 134–5, 141, 160, 190, moral psychology 8, 77, 79, 89, 94, 96–7,
197 99
Lu Xiangshan (陸象山) 73 Morris, Charles W. 206–7
Lu Xun (魯迅) 82, 87 Mou Zongsan (牟宗三) 74–6
Mozi (墨子) 100, 104, 106
Macfie, Alexander Lyon 263 n.12 Müller, Friedrich Max 166
Mach, Ernst 166 mystical 5, 9–10, 46, 50, 63, 111–13,
Makkreel, Rudolf A. 255–6 115–17, 120, 127, 137, 145, 147,
Malebranche, Nicolas 15, 26, 111, 141 149–50, 162, 178, 205–7, 209–11,
Mañjuśrī 238 214–16, 221, 224, 226–8, 230,
Manu 84 241–2, 249, 251
Marcuse, Herbert 204–7 mythical 27, 38, 113, 137, 183, 188–9, 239
Marx, Karl 17, 76, 109, 208
Marxism 57, 208 Nāgārjuna 4–5, 40, 240
Massis, Henri 60, 206 nationalism 46, 55, 57, 61, 63–5, 68, 71,
material force (qi 氣) 27 107, 213, 255, 259
May, Reinhard 129, 235 National Socialism 35, 57–9, 61, 68–9,
May Fourth Movement (wusi yundong 五 120, 135, 171, 177–8, 191–3
四運動) 30, 45, 55, 70 naturalism 26, 52, 79, 112, 115, 126, 150,
Mazu Daoyi (馬祖道一) 218, 222–3, 167–8, 170, 177–80, 183, 189–90
233–4, 240, 244, 246–7 Neo-Confucianism (songming lixue 宋明
Meiners, Christoph 20, 86, 263 n.13 理學) 5, 7–8, 14, 27, 70–1, 74–5,
Meinong, Alexius 60 104, 112, 151, 222, 257
Mencius (Mengzi 孟子) 34, 53, 91, Neo-Kantianism 55, 73, 79, 230
99–100, 106–7 Neo-Platonism 149, 231
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 4, 162–4, 253, Neumann, Eugen 168, 174
259, 308 n.1 Neurath, Otto 15, 29
Minzhu pinglun 民主評論 (Democratic New Confucianism (xin rujia 新儒家) 44,
Review) 74 54–5, 74, 76, 106, 258
Misch, Georg 7, 9, 14, 16, 25–6, 30–5, 38, New Culture Movement (xin wenhua
40–1, 47, 50, 66, 110–11, 132, 138– yundong 新文化運動) 30, 44
51, 156–7, 159, 169, 183, 185–6, New Sensation School (xin ganjue pai 新
188–90, 201, 230, 254, 257–8 感覺派) 44
and biography 31, 132, 147 Newton, Isaac 28
and breakthrough (Durchbruch) 34, Nietzsche, Friedrich 8, 16, 25–6, 51, 63,
142, 169, 189–90, 258 77, 79–88, 90, 93, 95–6, 98–109,
342 Index
165–6, 173–5, 178, 180, 190, 208, intercultural philosophy 1, 4–5, 9, 14,
227, 234 31, 50–1, 65, 109–10, 156, 159–60,
and Buddhism 165–6, 173–5 186, 191, 198, 254, 257
and China 25, 83–6 origin/s of philosophy 6, 9, 33, 133,
and ressentiment 79–83, 85–8, 90, 135–9, 143, 145–6, 148, 157, 169,
100–1, 107–8 186, 188, 198
nihilism 117, 164–5, 174–5, 202, 232–4, Physis (φύσις) 132, 137, 147–8, 150, 250
241, 248 piety 28–9, 115, 182, 209
nirvana 114, 166, 211, 232, 240 Plato 5, 27, 84, 143, 167, 198
Nishi Amane (西周) 4 Plessner, Helmuth 7, 16, 35, 128, 138–40,
Nishida Kitarō (西田幾多郎) 219 142, 156
Nishitani Keiji (西谷啓治) 211–12, 219, 227 Ploetz, Alfred 28
nothingness 10–11, 112–14, 122–3, 165–6, plurality 9, 33–4, 37, 43, 124, 140, 146,
174–5, 198, 209, 211–12, 217, 225, 156, 183–5, 190, 254
227–37, 239, 241–2, 244–5, 247–52, poetic 8–9, 28, 115–16, 123–9, 137, 142,
257, 302 n.8. also compare emptiness 195, 242, 244, 250
“absolute nothing” 211, 229, 235, 244 Popper, Karl 28
“oriental nothingness” 227, 302 n.8 Popper-Lynkeus, Josef 7, 15–16, 28–9, 40,
61, 84
ontotheology 4, 9, 112, 138, 164, 217, 232, and Confucian human piety 28–9
236, 241 positivism 51–2, 54, 69, 146, 231–3, 236,
Oriental despotism 3, 19–20, 22, 35, 84, 241
86, 263 n.9, 263 n.12, 263 n.13 Pound, Ezra 26
Orientalism 19, 25–6, 29–30, 50, 64, 66, Practicing the Mean (Zhongyong 中庸)
195, 214, 256, 263 n.12 41
and Orientalist “feminization” 19, 25, pragmatism 45, 69, 72, 206–7
263 n.12 Puhua (普化) 239
origin 6, 9, 33, 133, 135–6, 138–9, 143, Pu Songling (蒲松齡) 115–16
145–6, 148, 157, 169, 186–8, 198.
See also beginning Quinet, Edgar 165
Qu Shiying (瞿世英) 56, 66
paganism 9, 25, 36–7, 114, 164, 214
pantheism 15, 18–19, 63, 112, 114, 166. race 3, 5, 20, 24, 28, 40, 57–62, 69, 141,
See also Spinozism 159, 178, 180–1, 184–5, 213
Park, Jin Y. 242, 265 n.46 rationality
Parmenides 153, 231 communicative rationality 185–7,
patterning principle (li 理) 27 257–8
people (min 民; Volk) 24–5, 45–6, 58–9, crisis of reason 33, 54, 170–1, 177–80,
61–2, 64, 76, 85–7, 112, 134–5, 138, 183, 187, 257
144, 148, 180–2, 192–4, 212, 214, European and Eurocentric rationality
216, 263 n.13 2–3, 6, 11, 22, 43, 51, 59, 137, 145,
personalism 47, 105, 114–15, 124, 132, 169–70, 176–9, 183–5, 186–7, 191,
146, 210, 212, 217 201, 207–8, 257–9
phenomenology 9, 67, 140, 159–64, 171, finitude of reason 19, 67
173, 175–6, 178, 180, 184, 186, 190, holistic and situated rationalities 32,
197, 199, 230 51, 59, 73, 128, 145, 154, 185–7,
philosophy 208, 258
concept/idea of philosophy 2, 6, 9, 13, instrumental rationality 8–9, 24, 50–1,
16, 32–4, 139–40, 156, 173, 183, 98, 104, 119–21, 124, 126–7, 129,
185, 189–90, 197, 201, 258 132, 187, 220
Index 343
non-Western and intercultural Shayer, Stanisław 172

rationalities 23, 38, 43, 48, 51, 56, Shenxiu (神秀) 247
59, 72, 74–5, 145, 169–70, 183–4, silence 116–17, 127, 198, 209, 214, 216,
257–9 229–30, 244, 251–2
redemption 23, 31, 48, 165, 167–8, 172, Sinicization/Sinification 25, 44, 75
174 socialism 25, 29, 57–9, 71, 81
relativism 41, 139, 141, 151, 254, 258 Socrates 2, 26–8, 30–2, 36, 39, 75, 113,
Renan, Ernest 165 143–4, 149, 167, 169–71, 198–9
renewal 45, 48–50, 68, 70, 155, 159, 164, Spengler, Oswald 49, 128
168, 170–2, 179, 183, 194, 204 Spinoza, Baruch 15, 62, 99, 112, 143
resentment 8, 36, 77–9, 81–92, 94–100, Spinozism 18, 111–12. See also pantheism
102–8, 165 spirit (Geist) 9, 20–2, 24–5, 47–9, 52–4,
Ressentiment 79–83, 85–8, 90, 100–1, 67, 80, 84–5, 87, 101, 105, 115–16,
107–8 124, 127, 129, 137, 143, 147, 176,
Rickert, Heinrich 76, 171 178–81, 190–3, 205, 212–14, 216
Rorty, Richard 34, 135, 137–8, 140, 156, Strawson, P. F. 77–9, 82–3, 85, 94, 275 n.2
195, 204 suffering 34, 86, 100, 106, 119–20, 143,
Rosenzweig, Franz 7, 15–16, 24–6, 28, 31, 165–6, 173–4, 182, 220, 240, 249
36–7, 111, 113–14, 137–8, 145, 182, Sun Yat–Sen (孫逸仙) 45–6
210–15, 217, 232 Suzuki Daisetsu (鈴木大拙) 175, 203–4,
Rushd, Ibn (Averroes) 3, 5 227
Russell, Bertrand 35, 55–6, 171–2, 230
Tagore, Rabindranath 55, 182
sacred 15, 117, 210, 217, 220, 233–4, 238, Tai Xu (太虚) 66
244 technology 8, 118, 125, 128–9, 132, 192–5,
Samson-Himmelstjerna, Hermann von 59 202–4
Śaṅkara 5 teleology 137, 141, 144, 176, 178, 180,
Sartre, Jean-Paul 163 182–4, 187–8, 191, 213, 249
Scheidemann, Philipp 57 Tezuka Tomio (手塚富雄) 196
Scheler, Max 8, 47, 68, 77, 79–83, 87, 93–5, third-person perspective 78, 94, 125, 161
98–9, 101–2, 105–7, 163, 174 tian (天, heaven, nature) 15, 19, 36, 92,
and ressentiment 79–83, 87, 93–5, 105, 145
98–9, 101–2, 105–7 Tindal, Matthew 16
and suffering 174 trace 114, 152, 212, 222, 225, 247, 251
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Troeltsch, Ernst 68
15–16, 21, 27, 31, 62, 113 Tsujimura Kōichi (辻村公一) 228
and Confucius 27
and Laozi 113 uncanniness (Unheimlichkeit) 116, 136–7,
Schlegel, Friedrich 19 175, 235–6, 243–5
Schleiermacher, Friedrich 15, 18–19, 132,
199, 255 vitalism 7, 44, 47, 55, 58–9, 87
and Confucianism 18–19 Voltaire (Arouet, François-Marie) 15–16,
and hermeneutics 199, 255 19, 27–8, 145
Schmitt, Carl 139
Schopenhauer, Arthur 48, 109, 165–6, 174 Wagner, Richard 165
Schwarcz, Vera 55 Wang Bi (王弼) 152
scientism 45, 51, 69–70, 75, 179 Wang Guowei (王國維) 165
Searle, John 160 Wang Yangming (王陽明) 7, 53, 71, 73,
Seosan (西山) 245 104
shame 77–8, 103–4 Wartenburg, Paul Graf Yorck von 133
344 Index
Weber, Max 16, 22–5, 31, 48, 81, 111, 126, Zaisheng 再生 (The National Renaissance)
165–6, 187, 201 72, 75
Wertheim, David 61 Zen Buddhism. See Chan/Zen Buddhism
Westernization 7–8, 44–5, 49, 51, 66, Zhang Junmai (張君勱) (Chang, Carsun)
69–70, 75, 101, 181–2 7–8, 44–5, 47–59, 63, 65–6, 69–76,
Wilhelm II 59 81, 99, 105–6, 108, 187, 258
Wilhelm, Richard 36, 44, 56, 60, 66–8, and Confucianism 44–5, 47–50, 52–5,
110, 114, 118, 121, 170 63, 65, 69–76, 81, 99, 106, 258
Willemer, Marianne von 259 and debate with Ding and Hu 69–70, 72
Wittfogel, Karl A. 60, 263 n.9 and institutionalization of the Way
Wittgenstein, Ludwig 229–32 (liguo zhi dao 立國之道) 71
Wolff, Christian 14–16, 18–19, 50, 109–10, and Kant 44, 48, 52, 54–6, 65–7, 70–6,
145 79
worldview 62, 69, 71, 111, 125, 131, and Mou 74–6
138–40, 147–9, 205, 254–5 Zhang Taiyan (章太炎) 165
Wright, Dale S. 241–3, 245, 247 Zhang, Wei 55
Wu, Shengqing 30, 265 n.47 Zhao Dongming (趙東明) 257, 309 n.12
Zheng Tianxi (郑天锡) 96
Xiao Shiyi (蕭師毅, Hsiao Shih-yi) 122, Zhuangzi (莊子) 4–5, 8–10, 37, 63, 66–8,
134 110–11, 114–21, 123–9, 134, 142–3,
Xici (系辞) 154–5 149–51, 190, 198, 203, 211, 214,
xin (心, heart-mind/mind) 27, 52–3, 73, 245, 253
96–8, 103–6, 121, 154, 217–18, 223, and butterfly dream (zhuangzhou
225, 228, 238–40, 243–7 mengdie 莊周夢蝶) 10, 203
Xu Gan (徐幹) 102 and free and easy wandering (xiaoyao
Xu Zhimo (徐志摩) 66 you 逍遥游) 116, 127, 134
xuanxue 玄學 (“dark learning”) 70 and nourishing life (yangsheng 養生)
Xueheng 學衡 (Critical Review) 30, 265 68, 116–18, 120, 122
n.47 and transformation (hua 化) 116, 151
Xunzi (荀子) 36, 100, 102, 105 and trees 121, 125, 127
and uselessness (wuyong 無用) 119,
Yajnadatta 240 121, 123–5, 127
“yellow peril” (gelbe Gefahr) 59–60, 180, and zhenren (真人, authentic, genuine,
213 perfected person/life) 116–18
Yijing (易經, Book of Changes) 22–3, 66, Ziarek, Krzysztof 250
73–4, 140, 151–5, 208, 284 n.27 Ziegler, Leopold 68
yinyang (陰陽) 153 Žižek, Slavoj 213, 299 n.41
Yuanwu (圜悟) 237 Zongmi (宗密) 222, 226, 236, 241

Eric S. Nelson - Chinese and Buddhist Philosophy in Early Twentieth-Century German Thought-Bloomsbury Academic (2017)

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Chinese and Buddhist Philosophy

Comparative Philosophy without Borders, edited by

50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway

First published 2017

© Eric S. Nelson, 2017

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

No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-0255-5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cover design: Catherine Wood

Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

1 A Peculiar Journey: Confucian Philosophy in German Thought 13

Conclusion: Toward an Intercultural Philosophy 253

A work by a single author is a collective and social effort relying on a relational

The first half of Chapter 3 draws on: “The Question of Resentment in

Chapter 4: “Technology and the Way: Buber, Heidegger, and ‘Daoism.’”

Chapter 5: “Heidegger, Misch, and the Origins of Philosophy.” Journal of

Chapter 8: “Demystifying Experience: Nothingness and Sacredness in

We should not be ashamed to acknowledge truth from whatever source it comes

The chapters of this book consist of a series of philosophically oriented

strategic manipulation by denying them recognition as independent persons

thinking in East Asia, for instance, indicate multiple examples of self-inquiry,

constructs—as consisting of a one-way colonial relation transferring and

Description of the chapters

Chapter 1 offers an elucidation of the reception of Confucius (Kongzi 孔子) and

their concern with Zhuangzi cannot mean a return to a dogmatic religiosity

and Asian thought are examined. Husserl discussed Buddhism in a sympathetic

by wayfaring. The discourses of Heidegger and some forms of Chan Buddhism

A Peculiar Journey: Confucian Philosophy

Introduction: Whose Confucius? Which Confucianism?

Modern Western philosophy—which is simultaneously universal in its pretensions

priori—continues to haunt and confine the experiential and critical potential

consisting of multiple incompatible interpretative strategies and theses.

This understanding of Confucius is echoed in earlier accounts. The English

Part One: The Europeanization of Confucius

The Chinese and the European Confucius

Early ru 儒 or Confucian discourses prioritized rituals (li 禮), which should be

of thinking. Schleiermacher adopted a religious interpretation, while rejecting

Confucian China in German social thinking: Hegel and

Hegel’s visualization of “Orientals” and the Orient sweepingly encompasses

exerted an extensive influence in the twentieth-century Western understanding

more intellectually and technologically advanced than the medieval West.

Franz Rosenzweig and the banality of sagehood

The early twentieth-century German-Jewish religious philosopher Franz

Rosenzweig caricaturized the Chinese as devoid of individual life, and lacking

in Levinas, no doubt has suggestive moments. It is insufficient, particularly in

The anti-Socratic and Socratic Confucius

In another interpretive tendency of the idea of Confucius in the West, modern

whether (1) Confucius inaugurated a revolution in enlightened ethical reflection

Inspired by Voltaire, the Austrian scientist, secular public intellectual, and

of bourgeois liberal pacifists, and the hypocrisy of their internationalism, how

Part Two: Retrieving Confucius: Buber, Misch,

Georg Misch: The Confucian ethical revolution

A distinctive interpretation of Socrates and Confucius is found in a neglected

rational individuality in response to the European philosophers’ negative

In contrast to the habitual exclusion of Confucius—not to mention other

An exchange of life: Confucianism as self-reflective

Misch unfolded a hermeneutical life-philosophical account of the teaching of

Confucianism: Too noble for Europe?

Another way of interpretively disregarding the relevance of non-Western

by or as philosophy, since this would entail its denigration to estranged dualistic

Buber’s Confucius: Between particularism and pluralism

Buber’s elucidation of Confucianism has its flaws and limitations insofar as

1 A Peculiar Journey: Confucian Philosophy in German Thought 13

Conclusion: Toward an Intercultural Philosophy 253