at) Otto Poggeler West-East Dialogue: Heidegger and Lao-tzu reports that on January 14, 1976, Martin Heidegger in- ‘house for the evening. Heidegger asked the theologian ive of Messkirch if he would speak at his funeral in his ‘ich then took place shortly thereafter, on May 28). ig at that time on Meister Eckhart, this thinker ition, and Heidegger’s cautious question- ing focuses Abgeschiedenheit) of which the mystic had spoken.’ In his youth Heidegger had not only dealt with the Scholas- ic doctrines of categories, logic and language, but had also promised a > mysticism. As he became acquainted with Eckhart ypus tri m” during the twenties he was so enthusiastic that his students expecting a work on Eckhart from him. However, in his lectures on Aristotle's Metaphysics from the summer of 1931, Heidegger said that Eckhart was in fact the only one in the Middle Ages to have had found only an over-hasty answer in at after a first approach he had given’ finite predicate and could not be igere, the openness of knowl- ‘The short essay “Der Feldweg” from 1947 connects a rec irch home with a word of “Eckehar« old master of reading and living.” to the effect that God was only God in D> the “unspoken” language of the “things” by the country path, In 1979 Bernhard Welte publi ‘of which he was able to say that his last conversation with Heidegger, so close to the lat- ter’s death, had gone into in such a way that intelligere, coné ‘grants openness to Being, and thus metaphysics and mysticism, but also a7their traditions and Heidegger's new thinking, attain a seamless unity This unity is also presupposed for both Western mysticisin and Ease Asian contemplation and thereby for two quite different religious tradic tions. From the perspective of a philosophy influenced by Zen Buddhism, ishitani has made clear to European and American readers, in hig sreat book Was st Religion? (Religion and Nothingness), how Heidegger made possible a new encounter between Eastern and Western thought! Nishtani clears the way to the decisive questions with Heidegaer sarting from the experience of time: that which isin time not only hangs over the abyss of nothingness, but also has inthe dimensions of past and future an depth, out of which each one of them can interfuse itself with the whole of the other. Its true that the Mediterranean European tradition has in a twofold way understood this interfusion one-sidedly and falsely: fom the Iranian and Judaic origin the uniqueness of history was discov. ered, and then again after Kierkegaard the personal and historical were set against the impersonality of a mythical eternal return and the mecha. nism of science. On the other hand one finds in Nietzsche and the willing return an attitude that gives itself no further illusions about that which is. Kierkegaard’s theism, or his transformation of it into an m, and Nietzsche's atheism remained final experiments, on paths; by contrast Meister Eckhart would lead by way of release, / ment” (Gelassenheit) and detachment, and thereby through the death of the I, from God to the “absolute nothingness” of the Godhead. “In his reservation of the ‘nothingness’ of the Godhead in the ground of the pe sonal ‘God! he stands and develops his thinking ‘on the other shore? \ beyond theism and atheism, in the place where conversely the indepen. dence of the ‘soul’ is grounded in essential oneness with the being of God.” And so it is Meister Eckhart in turn who supports Heidegger's attempt to lead us out of the Western metaphysical tradition and its apo- rias; and in as far as Eastern and Western thought engage in dialogue, the ‘West as much as the East can find its way back to itself Heidegger himself in his lecture “What Calls for Thinking?” has dis- covered in the Western tradition the two culminations of wrong paths we have mentioned: on the one hand, the attempt to re-shelter the human will through repentance back into the will of God; on the other, the will- ing that in revenge against time and its “it was” paradoxically wills pre- cisely the eternal return of the same.* In ncither case would man find himself in time in the appropriate way—claimed by a call that calls for thinking to think. If Heidegger in his discussion of “releasement” in Eck- hart finds much of value, he still sees in it a “throwing off of sinful self centeredness and the letting go of the individual will in favor of the of God.” And so, would Eckhart not thereby also be-the above-men- tioned wrong path of the Western tradition? Such a criticism of Eckhart Were Sa may well apply to the Eckhart of the “Pedagogical Discourses” (Reden © or Unterweisung), who provisionally, still attached to the traditional the “having of God” (Gott- religious language, brings releasement and the “having P praben) of detachment close t hi sine and eades tems the ickhare who lets God be for the sake of the Godhead, yet thereby experi- Eset spar of with the life of the Godhead. Meis- ter Eckhart quite *Neoplatoically” sets tings aside forthe sake of ichment; in this specific way he can then in harmony with the meta- sive tradition attain an onto-theology which wins back, from God as the highest being, that which is. However, what is decisive for Eckhart is that in his last “mystical” experiences he leaves the Neoplatonic and metaphysical path behind, And yet Heidegger scems to demand that the path of thinking be approached differently from the very start: in the © renunciation of unconditionedness (Unbedingtheit) the Godhead should be found in the unspoken language of things and works (as Eckhart him- self demands in the sermon “Misit dominus manum suam”). Can we pre- suppose that nothingness as mystical nothingness is pure light? Are not rather light and darkness given to us simultaneously from the beginning, but in such a way that in the language of each and every thing something unspoken, self-withholding, is the center, so that things themselves bring us into detachment, which releases us from control over things? It could | have been Far Eastern meditation that encouraged Heidegger to take this different path to the determination of detachment starting from the nthe meantime there has been a great deal of evidence that Heidegger gladly acknowledged to visitors the closeness of his thinking to the Taoist tradition and to Zen Buddhism. When the University of Hawaii held a symposium entitled "Heidegger and Eastern Thought” onthe ocason of his eightieth birthday, this closeness was particularly illuminated.” In fact since the fifties some people have sought to express this closeness by say- ing that Heidegger “identified aesthetic feeling with ontological experi- ence” or with “pre-ontological experience.” Heidegger is supposed to have attempted to ree himself from representational thinking in order to engage in meditative thinking, to make the transition from “an analytical approach to a direct, intuitive one.” But if one recalls the negative context in which the word “aesthetic” has always stood in Heidegger, one must treat these kinds of testimonies, which arise from conversations during bre vs, wit some sepiciom. n philosophical conversations Heideg, ser proceeded quite slowly, after adopting provisional orientations an {Srensns tard the aun uesnsy which chen superseded the jer formulations; and the English language still remained one which Heidegger scarcely understood, and for which he had little respect. In any case one hardly needs the testimony of hasty visitors, since a consid-a ae erable number of Japanese philosophers have studied with Heidegger and with life-long effort have elaborated the intimations they gained.* Nishida had built a bridge to German Idealism; while Schelling was in the foreground, there was also a novel accent through Hegel’ insistence on mediation. This was attempted by Tanabe, who after studying in Freiburg was the first in Japan, in 1924, to have reported on “Heideg- ger’s phenomenology of iife” as “a new turn in phenomenology” Count Kuki explicated Being and Time to his Japanese colleagues, and later Nishitani attended Heidegger’s lectures on Nietzsche. Nishitani, how- ever, was to insist more than Tanabe on the ultimate immediacy of basic experience. And it was into Heideggerian language that the ancient Chi- nese Zen story of “The Ox and the Ox-herd,” with interpretations by a contemporary Zen master, was translated in 1958 by Koichi Tsujimura and Hartmut Buchner. On Heidegger's eighticth birthday Tsujimura spoke in Messkirch on “Martin Heidegger’s Thinking and Japanese Phi- losophy:” He sought to show that a Zen-influenced philosophizing could learn from Heidegger how better to reflect upon the contemporary situa- tion—for us, the current advance of technology. Already in the volume On the Way to Language Heidegger had woof” weided & cpovetonian with 2 jepuness guest which had been written \_ down between 1953 and 1954. in this kind of dialogue Heidegger by no ‘means proceeded from a philosophy informed by Zen or meditation; rather he continually asked himself and others whether in the talk of nothingness in his lecture “What Is Metaphysics?” and in Japanese phi- osophers coming from different traditions something very different was not being thought. In the piece entitled “Conversation on Language” Heidegger tried in looking back on his own path, on which Being and language were ultimately connected, to retrieve his own concern in pri- ‘mal words of the Japanese language (the translation of which into Ger- man must of course be checked). Heidegger himself maintained, more- over, that from early on he had worked with Japanese scholars, “but had earned more from Chinese.” In 1946 he collaborated with a Chinese scholar on a translation into German of the Lao-t2u, but they completed only eight of the eighty-one chapters.’ In his “destruction” of the Western tradition, Heidegger did not stop with the almost already Hellenistic analyses and systemizations of Aristotle nor with late mysticism; he rather looked to the earliest thinkers for the beginnings that have con- stantly informed and also perhaps distorted the concern (Sache) of thin ing. Did he not in his dialogue with the Far East have to go back similarly to the beginnings of those traditions, as we are able to construe them in Lao-tzu, for example, or in the work which was given that name? In Being and Time Heidegger reclaimed for the logos of his phenome- nological ontology, which was as universal as it was radical, the charac- ‘West-East blialogue revert to Daseit as the openness of Being from which it arises; itis to be jntegrated into the current historical situation, and should reach through this situation to a concealed origin and thereby transform the situation in the direction of a new future. A philosophizing of this kind must be aware that the beginning of philosophy with the Greeks, viewed histor cally, is ultimately only one beginning of thinking among others and per- haps discloses the origin of thinking in a one-sided and distorted way. In this vein Georg Misch, for example—after having been able to reflect ‘upos Fis philosophical ideas in the course of a journey around the world =n his philosophy textbook The Way into Philosophy (1926 and 1950) distinguished the Logos of Heraclitus from other prinialtermis SUCH as the” Indian Bral ind the Chinese tao. When Heidegger transposed his Syacnas iB and time back into the Ereignis of truth as the place of \ terization “hermeneutics” and “hermeneutical.” This philosophizing is to | } estion the Ereign ihe moment (Augenblicks-Stdtte), he conceived of time as “time-play- space” (Zeitspielraum) and thereby as a movement which as way and sunidenWway lets things rest in a stillness and stilledness, from which logos as language frst arises. Thus in On the Way to Language he could invoke \\ Lao-tzu: “Perhaps there lies concealed in the word ‘Way tao, the mystery of all mysteries of thoughtful saying, as long as we let this name return to spokenness and are able to accomplish this letting. . . . All is cture “The Principle of Identity” adds to its own tal of Ereignis (event of appropriation) the Greek logos and Chinese tao as untranslatable guiding words of thinking, ** ; Lao-tzu did not become significant for Heidegger as a result of a uni- versal and neutral historical contemplation, but rather in a quite definite context, When in 1945 National Socialism finally collapsed in its strug- ale for world domination, Heidegger was confronted with the fact that up co at least 1933 he had placed himself at the disposal of the new “breakthrough” in a delusion concerning the true goals of that move- tment. In December 1945, in the course of the de-Nazification proceed- \ ings—in the “Inquisition trial of the twenty-three questions,” as he put it —Heidegger suffered a breakdown and had to be taken to a sanatorium for three weeks.!? The small book written in his mountain cabin, Aus der Exfabrung des Denkens (From the Experience of Thinking), is not con- cerned with fir branches and the sound of cowbells; rather, in this piece thinking seeks in the manner of one severely ill and only now convalesc- ing to right itself through the simple experiencing of seasons and times of day, and to reflect anew upon its task (as the interpretations of Japanese scholars have recognized).!* Connected _with this.coll written in extremis is Heidegger's attempt at a translation of Lao-tzu. It is not sur- Prising that his ChineSe colleague soiight to allay Heidegger’s bitterness over the vagaries of politics with an adage from Mencius: “When heaven