Abstract
The German philosopher Martin Heidegger is one of the few Western thinkers who take a serious interest in the Chinese tradition of Daoism—he once tried to translate the canonical text Daodejing into German with the help of a Chinese scholar. Even though his attempt at translation did not succeed, his congenial reading of Laozi and Zhuangzi has been viewed as a creative appropriation of a philosophical school from another cultural tradition. Drawing upon current discussions in Heidegger research, this article will address Heidegger’s interpretation of some key concepts of Daoism, including ‘emptiness’, ‘uselessness’, and ‘nothingness’. This will show the extent to which Daoist thinking provides a new possibility for understanding Heidegger’s later philosophy, especially the question of Being.
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Notes
- 1.
Keiji Nishitanti, Shuzo Kuki, Paul Shih-yi Hsiao, Chung-yuan Chang, and D. T. Suzuki among others are the most prominent scholars to name (May, 1996, pp. 1–11).
- 2.
The page numbers refer, respectively, to the English translation and the original German version.
- 3.
I interpret this passage in detail elsewhere (see Yang, 2016, pp. 53–55).
- 4.
Bret Davis has delineated in detail the itinerary of how the idea of will figures in different periods of Heidegger’s thinking.
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Acknowledgement
This article is part of the project ‘Heidegger from the Perspective of Chinese Philosophy’ (2020JG008-BZX841) sponsored by the Shanghai Philosophy and Social Science Program.
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Yang, G. (2023). Martin Heidegger and Daoism in Dialogue. In: Jin, H., Stecher, A., Ehrenwirth, R. (eds) Contemporary German–Chinese Cultures in Dialogue. Global Germany in Transnational Dialogues. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26779-6_12
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