Heidegger and Dao

Daoism and the Human Experience

Series Editor: David Chai

Associate Professor of Philosophy, Chinese University of Hong Kong

Editorial Advisory Board

Lisa Raphals, University of California, Riverside (USA)
Robin Wang, Loyola Marymount University (USA)
Franklin Perkins, University of Hawaii (USA)
Eric S. Nelson, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Hong Kong)
Thomas Michael, Beijing Normal University (China)
James Sellmann, University of Guam (USA)
Chris Fraser, University of Toronto (Canada)
Bret Davis, Loyola University Maryland (USA)
Zongqi Cai, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (USA)
Zhihua Yao, Chinese University of Hong Kong (Hong Kong)

Daoism and the Human Experience creates a platform to explore, question,

and learn about the ways Daoist thought elucidates the human experience in
its philosophical, literary, aesthetic, and spiritual manifestations. We welcome
contributions focusing on Daoist thought itself, as well as those that explore
it within the broader context of China, East Asia, continental Europe, India,
Africa, the Americas, and the Islamic world.

Titles in the series include:

Daoist Resonances in Heidegger, edited by David Chai
 Heidegger and Dao

Things, Nothingness, Freedom

Eric S. Nelson
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To Shengqing
vi
 Contents

Acknowledgments viii

Introduction 1

Part One Dao, Thing, and World 11

1 Way, Thing, and World in Laozi, Zhuangzi, and Heidegger 13
2 The Autopoietic Self-Transformation of Things in
Ziranist Daoism and Heidegger 37
3 Heidegger and Laozi’s Daodejing: The Gathering Emptiness
of Thing and Place 59
4 Heidegger and the Zhuangzi: The Uselessness and
Unnecessariness of Things 85
5 Heidegger’s Dao amidst Thing and World 107

Part Two Nothingness, Emptiness, and the Clearing 131

6 Daoist Nothingness, Buddhist Emptiness, and the Myth of “Oriental
Nothingness” 133
7 Nothingness, Emptiness, and the Clearing: An Intercultural Interpretation 147
8 The Nothing, Nihilism, and Heidegger’s East Asian Entanglements 167
9 Reimagining the Ethics and Politics of Emptiness 187

Notes 199
Bibliography 228
Index 245
 Acknowledgments

A book does not belong solely to its author. Hermeneutical transmissions, the research
of others, and myriad conversations and encounters have helped inform my thinking
and make this present work possible. I am grateful to all the teachers, scholars, and
friends who have shaped my way. I would particularly like to express my gratitude to
Emilia Angelova, Charles Bambach, Mark Cabural, David Chai, Charles Chan, Chung-
ying Cheng, Kim-chong Chong, Bret Davis, Joshua Derman, William Edelglass, Timo
Ennen, Saulius Geniusas, Siby George, Fabian Heubel, Jean-Yves Heurtebise, Jenny
Hung, Patricia Huntington, Curtis Hutt, Leah Kalmanson, Sophia Katz, Halla Kim,
Hye Young Kim, Theodore Kisiel, Sai Hang Kwok, Kwok-ying Lau, David Michael
Kleinberg-Levin, Chenyang Li, Manhua Li, Dan Lusthaus, Rudolf Makkreel, John
McCumber, Thomas Michael, Ronny Miron, Anish Mishra, Kyung-ah Nam, Richard
Nelson, On-cho Ng, Franklin Perkins, Dennis Prooi, François Raffoul, James Risser,
Frithjof Rodi, Jana Rošker, Frank Schalow, Dennis Schmidt, Martin Schönfeld, Brian
Schroeder, Yumi Suzuki, Kellee Tsai, Qingjie James Wang, Robin Wang, Youru Wang,
Mario Wenning, Ann Pang-White, Jason Wirth, Simon Wong, Tung Tin Wong, and
especially Shengqing Wu.
I am also thankful for the following research opportunities and funding sources:
the Herzog August Bibliothek (Wolfenbüttel) and the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
where I wrote the initial draft of this book; HKUST IEG20HS01, Hong Kong Research
Grants Council (RGC) GRF 16631916, and Hong Kong Research Grants Council
(RGC) HSSPFS 36000021 for funding archival, library, and other research activities.
Readers should keep in mind that this book is a sequel to Nelson 2017 that can, of
course, be read independently as a related “intercultural genealogy.” Note that there is
some slight repetition in the text to remind readers in later chapters of earlier significant
points. Some of the short discussions of Daoism, Buddhism, other German thinkers
and writers, social-political philosophy, and Heidegger’s broader life and thought
might strike some as excursions, but they serve to contextualize, illustrate, and support
the overall argument and interpretation offered in this book. As I interpret Heidegger
in an intercultural, anarchic-egalitarian, and participatory democratic context, this
requires confronting Heidegger’s worst moments and tendencies while intensifying
the thinking of freedom as releasement.
Also note, lengthier quotations from Chinese and German language sources have
been placed in the endnotes. With both early ziranist or generative Daoism and
Heidegger, it is difficult to think with and through their sources without encountering
and engaging their words and linguistic strategies in their own sense and context.
Finally, note that parts of Chapters 1, 4, and 8 appear in substantially different forms
in Nelson 2022c: 141–62; Nelson 2022: 787–806; and Nelson 2023b.
 Introduction

1. Heidegger and the Way

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) is a philosopher of being under and on the way. “Way”
is arguably a more elemental guiding word than being, beings, or meaning to express
the twists and turns of his thinking.1 Heidegger insisted throughout his writings that
the way toward a more decisive questioning of being, the unthought matter to be
thought, is more fundamental than any given determinate answer or expected result.
Each anticipatory indicative response remains provisional as the way itself overturns
expectations and compels reposing the question of being anew. Heidegger’s early
methodology of formal indication and its continuation as wayfaring explains the
variety, originality, and intensity of his reflections that cannot be reduced to a method
or a doctrine.2 This interpretive situation compels his readers to repose and enact for
themselves the questionability and perplexity of that which is to be thought and enter a
condition of being underway without a predetermined destination and purpose.
Thinking anticipates through expectations that can be upturned and reoriented
by what is encountered. There is no uninterrupted “royal road” of conceptualization
from thought and the subject to the truth of being. Heidegger himself confessed
that he was confronted with—playing on the senses of “Holzwege,” wooden or forest
paths—unexpected twists, turns, and dead ends. The dead end is the place where one is
forced to double back, repeat one’s steps, and take new ones. He also spoke of his own
errors and stupidities, as his pathways traversed freedom and fixation, good and evil, and
truth and errancy. Numerous publications have reconstructed these pathways through
narratives of unconcealment and concealment, social-political errancy and offense,
and private reticence and hiddenness. The thinker is not only persistently concealed
from others but remains concealed and unknown to himself. The philosopher of the
unthought in the history of metaphysics does not necessarily sufficiently confront his
own unthought. Nevertheless, thinking that would be appropriate to what is to be thought
in its event cannot sidestep arduous walks, narrow passages, and steep ascending and
descending paths. In Heidegger’s twisting byways and sideways, in the play of shadow
and light conveyed in his favorite passage from the Daodejing 道德經, a path emerges
in which thing and world would be released through their emptiness into the free
mystery of their own ways of manifesting and being. This is why philosophy, inveterately
wrapped up in its own self-referential conceptuality without adequately recognizing
2 Heidegger and Dao

that which addresses and motivates it, should ruthlessly criticize without abandoning
Heidegger’s thinking. More than this, it should be approached as an imperfect yet
insightful exemplary model that continues to speak to the present condition.
Why then write or read about Heidegger and the dao? What is this “dao”? An
initial clue is found in the Zhuangzi 莊子 that states a way is made by walking it. The
Chinese dao 道 character is composed of the radicals related to walking (辶) and
head (首). Some explanations accentuate the head as directing the feet. But the accent
here is on walking and moving, as the head follows the passage of the feet stepping
along the path and encountering the myriad things in their varying circumstances.
Relational freedom and unanxious ease (xiaoyao you 逍遥游) occur in a wandering
that recognizes and forgets things, values them in their uselessness and lets them go
in their departure, and transitions with the transformations of self and world. This
way as walked cannot be disconnected from that which is encountered on the way:
changing things, localities, seasons, and birth and death. According to the Zhuangzi,
these occur in an elemental generative nothingness (wu 無) from which attunement
occurs by emptying and forgetting the heart-mind (xin 心). Emptiness can signify
a gloomy absence of meaning in ordinary language. But, as linked with humility,
simplicity, and sincerity in early Chinese thought, it is constitutive of a free and
responsive way of life.
It is not accidental that Heidegger, who already began to think about the Daoist
way in 1919 and 1930, and early Daoists accentuated questions of the thing as that
which is to be encountered and nothingness as a way of living freely that undoes the
fixities of the self and identity. This inquiry will recount and radicalize their tactics
of questioning identity and undoing fixation. It is an attempt to critically reactivate
and reimagine Heidegger’s way in view of the early Daoist dao and, to a lesser but
still significant extent, the Buddhist dharma by (1) historically tracing and situating
Daoist and Buddhist influences operative in Heidegger’s German contemporaries and
his own thinking, (2) reinterpreting his thought from these sources (including those
unfamiliar to him), and (3) articulating the senses of the thing, generative nothingness,
and the open empty clearing for the sake of a renewed ethos of openness to things and
world, as a way of freely and responsively wandering and abiding amidst them and
the places they shape. This ethos, more elemental in its demand than recent object-
oriented philosophy and thing-theory, would recognize how things have their own
environing places and changing pathways, even if they are thought to have no well-
being or sentience of their own.
This threefold task demands a specific intercultural practice of hermeneutics (the
art of interpretation) in response to the tensions between historical circumstances
and philosophical questions. Interculturality challenges the orthodox identity-based
presuppositions that continue to dominate philosophy and its history. The heterodox
interpretive strategy deployed here is a mixture of historiographic and philosophical
inquiry, and Asian and European discourses, as we consider a variety of historically
positioned exemplary cases and traverse shifting perspectives with and beyond
Heidegger. First, archival and historical inquiry frees us to study the purportedly
“small,” semi-forgotten, and problematic questionable figures of an epoch that can lead
to a more appropriate hermeneutical contextualization and historical sensibility in
 Introduction 3

contrast to pure forms of theorizing and moralizing. The hermeneutics of words and
concepts entails examining multiple generations rather than only a single renowned
author. Engaging forgotten and semi-forgotten texts and authors can help facilitate
generational contextualization as well as their further rediscovery. Secondly, Daoist and
Buddhist texts should not only deliver raw data for European conceptual reasoning.
They offer a variety of argumentative and interpretive strategies with their own situated
specificity and philosophical stakes. Working through unthought hiddenness and the
anxieties of influence, this analysis reveals how Heidegger is unique among European
philosophers in learning from ways enacted in these sources.
What follows can be read as a reflection on Heidegger’s statement: “Releasement
toward things and openness for the mystery belong together. They grant us the
possibility of residing in the world in a wholly other way” (GA 16: 528). This constellation
of releasement, openness, mystery, things, and other ways of relational dwelling appears
throughout his discussions of Daoist sources and was developed in conversation with
them. Heidegger’s pathways to the releasement and freedom of things (Gelassenheit
der Dinge)—through the uncanniness of nothingness and the open emptiness of the
clearing—are informed by his explicit engagements and unthought resonances with
East Asian philosophies, particularly the Daodejing, attributed to the mysterious figure
of Laozi 老子 and the Zhuangzi. The early forms of these two anthologies, composed
from disparate sources, have been dated from the chaotic Warring States period
(475–221 bce). The redacted transmitted editions, used by the German translators
read by Heidegger and his contemporaries, stem from the post-Han Wei-Jin period
(220–420 ce). It is still insufficiently appreciated how the images and words employed in
late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century German editions reverberate throughout
Heidegger’s writings, giving them an aura of both familiarity and strangeness in
comparison with contemporary translations and readings.
How did this remarkable conjuncture and its concealment come to pass? Answering
this question, the first task of this study, requires a situating and singularizing
historical description. Heidegger’s interest in Daoism was part of a generational
movement—shared by Martin Buber and others—and unique in how it was adopted
into his thinking. Heidegger was aware of Daoism since at least 1919. He repeatedly
directly cited and indirectly evoked multiple translations of its two classics from
1930 (GA 80.1: 370; Petzet 1993: 18) to the final years of his life (GA 91: 667–8). It is
noteworthy, given the remarkable shift in his thinking in 1942–1944, how he explicitly
referenced and tacitly echoed—occasionally from 1919 to 1942 and with regularity
beginning in 1943—their thought-images and interpretive strategies. His pivotal crisis
and transformation of the mid-1940s, coinciding with the defeat of National Socialism,
might be described as a quasi- or semi-Daoist turn. It incorporates and systematically
reconfigures several distinctive Daoist elements based on German translations, his
translation activities and conversations with a visiting Chinese scholar, and his own
philosophical categories.
The significance of this adaptation of early Daoist sources into European
philosophy remains contentious. First, a formerly prevalent view sees this intersection
as a fortuitous personal idiosyncrasy that does not play a serious systematic role in
his thinking. Second, another—increasingly widespread—analysis holds that these
4 Heidegger and Dao

are crucial concealed sources from which his modes of speaking and thinking draw
insight, orientation, and—in the crises of the closing years of the Second World War
and early postwar period—healing and renewal. Earlier research on Heidegger and
the “East” prepared the way for this change in perceptions but are often Orientalizing,
mythologizing, and inadequately hermeneutically situated.3 They frequently fail to
appropriately recognize how these transmissions can dialogically speak back and help
us question and reimagine key themes and categories not only in Heidegger but in
European philosophy.

2. Shifting Perspectives: Heidegger’s Daoism

and Daoism’s Heidegger
The present interpretation of Heidegger and the dao has three interwoven objectives.
Its first aim is to convey a more multifaceted historical and intercultural sense of
Heidegger’s way, the Daoist dao, and the Buddhist dharma. It contests both Orientalist
fantasies about Heidegger and “Eastern wisdom” and the opinion that Heidegger had
myriad yet ultimately incidental Daoist affinities by tracing his Daoist encounters and
intersections and how they helped guide key aspects of his philosophical journey in an
elemental and systematic way. Its first mission is to map out Heidegger’s explicit and
implicit engagements with East Asian discourses concerning the thing, nothingness,
and world with the intent of articulating the conditions of an elemental encounter
with them. Second, this strategy makes it necessary to examine Daoist and Buddhist
constellations beyond Heidegger’s historically circumscribed acquaintance with them
and allow them the freedom to speak back to European transmissions and shift European
perspectives. A third interrelated undertaking, existentially the most vital as it is
compelled by our contemporary situation, is to indicate prospects of responsively attuned
and ecomimetic relations with things and within the world and, on that basis, the critical
unfettering potential of ways of being environmentally and publicly attuned in response
to existing ecological and social crisis-tendencies. These crises consist of the devastation
of earth and thing, the obscuring of sky and world, environmental degradation and
destruction, and the global climate predicament. Early Daoist philosophy and moments
in Heidegger’s thinking point toward different modes of attunement and dwelling that
can “leap ahead” (vorspringen) in “being-with” (to expand Heidegger’s early categories
beyond human existence) and nurture life in responsive attunement by sympoietically
(to adopt Donna Haraway’s expression) co-appropriating and collaborating with others
and things, self-patterning environing localities and ecosystems.
To accomplish this threefold task, this book’s opening part focuses on elucidating the
thing in its specificity and priority and Part Two on nothingness and how they mutually
form the locus of sense and world. More specifically, Part One presents a historically
informed intercultural description of Heidegger’s philosophical journey in the context
of an expansive analysis (beyond the German editions mentioned by Heidegger) of
Daoist practices of undoing fixations. Daoist discourses accentuate generativity and
fluidity, natality and mortality, responsive attunement (wuwei 無為) to spontaneous
 Introduction 5

self-naturing (ziran 自然), thingly transience and transformation (hua 化), and
the generative nothingness that nourishes the myriad things (wanwu 萬物). These
expressions and thought-images, which defy the bifurcation of concept and picture,
emerged in ancient Chinese sources mostly unfamiliar to Heidegger and other early
European readers. These documents encompass recently excavated pre-Qin era silk
and bamboo manuscripts, such as the Guodian and Mawangdui Laozi manuscripts that
have dramatically altered contemporary studies of early Chinese thought. Heidegger
also did not systematically investigate the transmitted Wei-Jin era mysterious learning
editions and commentaries of Wang Bi 王弼 (226–249 ce) and Guo Xiang 郭象
(252–312 ce). The Sinologist and translator Richard Wilhelm (1873–1930) did study
them, construing Daoism as a philosophy of the “sense of life,” and these two editions
served as the basis of every German translation available in Heidegger’s milieu.
Part Two shifts and expands the horizons of this inquiry from the Daoist thing to
nothingness, emptiness, and the clearing, drawing on Daoist, Buddhist, and modern
East Asian discourses. Heidegger’s earlier dismissiveness of Buddhism was adjusted
in the postwar period, especially regarding Zen Buddhism. This changed appreciation
is witnessed in his postwar conversations with visiting Japanese intellectuals and
his interview with the Thai Buddhist monk Bhikku Maha Mani. His modified
understanding is most evident in the 1953–1954 essay “From a Dialogue on Language.”
It marks the culmination of Heidegger’s turn from the fear and trembling of existential
nothingness to the clarity and freedom of emptiness, the open, and the clearing.
Accordingly, in Part Two, we delve into the roles of Daoist nothingness, Buddhist
emptiness, and East Asian discourses and interlocutors that helped mold postwar
Heidegger’s understanding of emptiness and clearing.
The project unfolded here offers a unique and innovative contribution in four
ways: (1) a systematic reexamination of the German language translations and
interpretations that shaped Heidegger’s linguistic context and individual engagement
with Daoism and the thing (in Part One) and Daoism, Buddhism, and nothingness
(in Part Two); (2) an analysis of the linguistic and conceptual shifts in Heidegger’s
thinking that correlate with his interactions with Daoist, Buddhist, and East Asian
texts and interlocutors; (3) a critical interpretation—with and beyond Heidegger and
his generation—of early Daoist and classic Buddhist sources as indicating models
of the self-nature of the thing and comporting oneself toward thing and world
through practices of emptiness; and (4) a Zhuangzian Daoist and “Flower Garland”
(Huayan 華嚴) Buddhist inspired critique and reimagining of the thing, nothingness,
releasement, and their contemporary import.

3. A Preliminary Overview of the Chapters

Part One’s five chapters examine varying answers to a question that recurs throughout
Chinese and German discourses: What is a thing? First, the thing in the restricted
sense signifies what is available, ready at hand, and useful. These “mere things” are
of bare significance in the availability of daily use and consumption. These are the
6 Heidegger and Dao

conventional anthropocentric categories of usefulness parodied and undermined in

the Zhuangzi and by the mature Heidegger. Second, the thing in its expansive sense
denotes “all beings” and encompasses all that is and might potentially be atoms, stones,
plants, animals, humans, spirits, gods, and heaven and earth. Chapter 1 unfolds Daoist
philosophy for the sake of resituating Heidegger’s thought, tracing the expansive image
and conception of things in texts associated with Laozi and Zhuangzi and their early
Chinese context. The expression wanwu (myriad things) points toward all existents in
their own concrete, plural, relational, and transformational generativity. Informed by
this “ziranist” or “generative” clarification of the thing, Chapters 2 to 5 track Heidegger’s
journey from a (predominantly yet not exclusively) pragmatically instrumental and
objectively represented thing (as useful instrumental tool and representational object)
to the fullness of the thing as thing that gathers place and world.
This proposed reading of Heidegger’s thing touches on a contested issue that can
be preliminarily addressed here: the appropriateness and inappropriateness of the
analysis of the thing and nature in Being and Time. I concur with Heidegger’s later
self-critique that this seminal, brilliant, and incomplete work is overly transcendental
and pragmatic, requiring a more radical step toward being and the thing that only fully
emerged after the Second World War.4 Heidegger mentioned but barely articulated
a “third” more primordial “power of nature” in Being and Time (GA 2: 70, 211) and
“nature in an originary sense” in the 1929 “The Essence of Ground” (GA 9: 155).
Heidegger noted that criticisms of the absence of nature in Being and Time were in part
correct in later self-reflections and retorted that this work did not aim at a complete
philosophical system (GA 82: 8, 293). Further, the thing cannot be simply identified
with nature, and nature with power, as Heidegger increasingly problematized in
his 1930s genealogies of phúsis and more fully recognized in the 1940s. The mature
Heidegger insisted on a turn from a still too Dasein-centric approach in the late
1920s, in which things are primarily perceived in their availability and serviceability,
toward the priority of the thing as “carrying and opening the there” (GA 82: 493–4).
This transition—whether understood as a gradual adjustment or fundamental
break—suggestively intersects with his readings of the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi.
The Zhuangzi, for instance, discloses through parables and perspectival shifts how
the pragmatically and conceptually available thing (labeled and fixed as an isolated
object) is not the dynamic thing encountered and followed in its transformations.
The “useless” free thing and the sustaining nourishing earth cannot be pragmatically
or theoretically dictated, and the very paradigm of the anthropocentric constitutive
subject is inadequate to them.
This is not the only example. Heidegger returned to Daoist-inflected interpretive
strategies and thought-images of letting beings and things be themselves, preserving
the darkness that nourishes, entering the silence in which genuine hearing happens,
emptying the heart-mind for the sake of the encounter and event, and the mystery
beyond mystery. Heidegger’s mature thinking of the ontological “event” (Ereignis) is
connected to his most mentioned line from the Daodejing. The event refers to what
is hidden coming into view, or the matter to be thought entering thinking, while it
inevitably retains dimensions of hiddenness and being unthought that escape the
subject. Heidegger’s resonances with the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi, based on a partial
 Introduction 7

degree of direct influence, allow for a reevaluation of Daoist ziran and Heidegger’s
“ziranist” leanings that culminate in the releasement of things.
The Daodejing states that all things, even the dao, follow their own ziran. What is
ziran? This expression emerged in a specific historical constellation that is profoundly
unlike yet still can speak to our situation. Two prevalent translations are spontaneity
and nature. “Nature” is inadequate to express what is meant by “ziran” and can only
be used in a highly qualified sense. Unlike the “nature” that is frequently opposed to
the human world in modern thought, and thus has an ideological and mythological
aura, ziran is enacted in all things human and nonhuman. “Ziranism” (in contrast
to reductive naturalisms) refers to the centrality of the multiplicity, spontaneity, and
transformation of self-generation and self-patterning. Daoist ziran signifies generatively
being self (zi 自) so (ran 然), autopoietic self-emerging and self-patterning, or nature
in the qualified sense of self-naturing. This sense of ziran is fundamental albeit
incompletely thought in Heidegger’s Daoist encounters. These engagements occurred
in the context of his understanding of Abendland (Occident, the evening land, Greek
hésperos and dúsis, which referred to Europe and not the “West” in the current sense)
and Morgenland (Orient, the morning land, Greek anatolḗ, the land of the rising sun).
Naturalism seeks to dictate the nature of the thing through a determining theory or
picture of what it considers true nature. It inadequately recognizes human participation
within nature. “Ziranism” expresses in contrast the need to attend to the self-unfolding
or self-dynamic of the thing that is possible through practices of emptying and realizing
the humility of the heart-mind (xuxin 虛心) and attuned non-coercive action (wuwei).
Daoist generativity does not entail naive oppositions between the organic and the
artificial, the primitive and the civilized, or the passive and the active, as inaction is
enacted in action, clarity in mystery, and simplicity in complexity. It likewise cannot be
reduced to a first principle or to causality, at least in their standard explanations, owing
to the elemental spontaneity and transformability in things themselves. Instead of an
unbroken determinate sequence, or resignation before an indifferent necessity, there
is an adaptive sense of generational change in natality and mortality that gives each
singular life its due while letting it go in death. This ziran-directed guiding strategy
entails the reconstruction of several core, and arguably the most transformative,
elements in Heidegger’s philosophy. Indeed, as this book demonstrates, Heidegger’s
anarchic and Daoist tendencies are closely interconnected in accentuating the
generative self-patterning of things. Ziran can be understood in the Zhuangzi through
images of dark watery chaos.5 This free self-patterning chaos has anarchic (without
arché or dao-archic) and—if reimagined under modern conditions—participatory
democratic implications in stressing adaptive spontaneity and collaborative or
sympoietic self-ordering by human and non-human individuals and communities;
this strategy necessitates critiquing Heidegger’s most problematic philosophical and
social-political commitments while recovering and extending moments of truth.
Chapter 6, analogous to the contextualization of Chapter 1, resituates Heidegger’s
thinking by shifting perspectives to Daoist generative nothingness (wu) and Buddhist
emptying emptiness (Sanskrit: śūnyatā; Chinese kong 空). These have their own
specificity and are not merely instances of a monolithic “Oriental nothingness” or
nihilism. Daoist nothingness and Buddhist emptiness have a variety of senses within
8 Heidegger and Dao

Daoist and Buddhist teachings that differ from the monotheistic creatio ex nihilo, the
“nonbeing” of classical Greek philosophy, and the mystical nothingness of Occidental
metaphysics and onto-theology. The systematic clarification of varieties of nothingness
and emptiness in Chapter 6 situates Chapter 7’s reenvisioning of Heidegger’s earlier
existentially oriented philosophy of nothingness and its subsequent transitions to the
emptiness and the clearing of his postwar thinking.
Chapter 8 concerns the intercultural position of Heidegger’s nothingness in its
early reception in the 1930s and 1940s by East Asian philosophers and intellectuals.
This chapter contains an exploration of the controversial and inconvenient
existential Buddhist and transnational fascistic intellectual Kitayama Junyū 北山
淳友 (1902–1962) whose philosophy of nothingness provides a counterargument to
my interpretation. Kitayama studied philosophy in Freiburg and Heidelberg during
the 1920s and remained active in Germany until 1944, providing significant clues to
Heidegger’s intercultural contexts. There are several reasons for this unusual retrieval.
First, he was directly involved in Heidegger’s German milieu, as one of the first authors
to extensively engage with the discourses of Heidegger and phenomenology, South
and East Asian Buddhism, and Japanese philosophy for two decades in Weimar
and National Socialist Germany. Secondly, Heidegger was familiar with him, and
several passages in Heidegger’s later interpretations echo Kitayama’s earlier uses
of Heideggerian categories. Thirdly, Kitayama’s problematic identification of the
nothingness of Daoism, Buddhism, and the Kyōto School with the destruction of the
liberal individual for the sake of collectivist nationalist, militaristic, and authoritarian
politics is valuable to illustrate the perils of incomplete elucidations of nothingness
and practices of emptiness.6 Emptiness does not loosen the borders between the
self and society for the sake of a determinate collective identity in classical Daoism
and Buddhism. It radically unfixes forms of substantive identity in, for instance,
the different strategies of equalizing things in nothingness (Zhuangzi) or reciprocal
interpenetration in emptiness (Huayan Buddhism) that releases both the specific
singular and the relational whole.
The concluding chapter draws out implications for a new philosophy of
nothingness, thing, and world. It reassesses the historical and political tensions of
modern discourses of nothingness by adopting the relational singular of Zhuangzi and
Huayan (which are distinctive yet complementary) to contest essentialized individual
and social realities. As collective identities are just as constructed and illusory as
individual identities, if not more so, it is a mistake with perilous consequences
to destructure and decenter the individual subject while fetishizing the collective
subject as a monological identity removed from communicative gathering and the
existential dynamics of personal and interpersonal life. The challenge is to encounter
and express connection and relatedness, and dismantle binary oppositions, without
disregarding environing locality and particularity or—to be clear—reducing them to
either particular or universal identities that systemically exclude and subjugate what is
non-identical. Since it would be negligent to avoid critical discussion of ideology and
politics in the current climate, even as ideology and culture-industry impact the most
critical consciousness and practices, the complex philosophical and social-political
contexts traced in the closing chapters entail learning from Heidegger’s insights and
 Introduction 9

failures to resituate the ethical and political roles of nothingness and emptiness,
reconsidering them with and beyond their previous incarnations.

4. Dao and Ethos: Critical Intercultural Implications

Heidegger has left a troublesome and thought-provoking legacy. The agrarian

utopianism that informed his interest in Daoism demands a differentiated ideology-
critical interpretation. His hermeneutical situation requires thinking through
ambiguity and complexity, as good and bad only appear in the finitude and
imperfection of life. Heidegger is one of the few modern European philosophers to
seriously engage with and adaptively learn from East Asian philosophy, breaking with
philosophy’s Eurocentrism in practice even if he could not do so within his conception
of Occidental philosophy (abendländische Philosophie). Heidegger, despite himself and
his problematic anti-democratic nationalist political commitments in the 1930s that
ziranist Daoism and Heidegger’s more thoughtful critics place in question, helps to
confront the continuing Eurocentrism of philosophy, its systematic distortion of the
history and practice of philosophy, and disclose other freer possibilities for thinking
and dwelling.
Daoist generative nothingness, Buddhist emptiness of form, and Heidegger’s open
clearing of being convey exemplary orientational models of being relationally free
and responsive in the world with things and environments. They disclose in their
radical moments three distinctive ways of transformatively undoing experiential
and linguistic hypostatization and of releasing self and things. As unfolded in this
ziranist philosophical reconstruction, each expresses ways of contesting sedimented
formations of reified life and thought. Daoist nurturing care (ci 慈) for things,
Buddhist loving-kindness and compassion for sentient beings, and Heidegger’s care
(Sorge) suggest distinctive indicative ways of leaping-ahead for and critical exemplary
models of caring for things and nourishing life.
There are two initial problems that confront this approach to Heidegger. First, his
formally indicative categories of care, being-with, and leaping-ahead were restricted
to human existence in Being and Time. Secondly, Heidegger described the analytic
of Dasein as ethically neutral and suspends the language of ethics, morality, and
value. This is a problem if interpreters are bound solely to Being and Time. The Berlin
philosopher Katharina Kanthack has argued that this neutrality does not entail ethical
indifference, which would signify a forgetting of care, but leads to an ethos of relational
being-with and ethical knowledge of self and other (Kanthack 1958 and 1964). This
formally emptied neutrality opens the concrete nexus of ethical questionability,
deliberation, and decision. It allowed for questioning the ethical modalities of leaping-
in (einspringen) to coercively dominate the other and leaping-ahead to care for and
nurture the other’s self-individuation. The later Heidegger provides instructive ways to
reorient and expand his earlier discourse. He speaks not of ethics, with its fixed rules
and virtues, but of ethos or “originary ethics” (GA 9: 356). He articulates an ethos more
fundamental than ethics and a worldly mortal abiding in openness to mystery that is
more originary than ethos (GA 98: 345). Most significantly, this ethos encompasses
10 Heidegger and Dao

things and their spaces. At the same time, factical existence is another key piece of the
puzzle, as intersubjective and interthingly comportments are complexly mediated by
material and social forms of life in which they serve apologetic ideological as well as
critical transformational roles.
The guiding aspiration of these chapters is to reinterpret and reimagine Heidegger’s
thinking of being and his originary ethics given their ziranist elements and our
hermeneutical situation. Its primary thesis is that, entangled with Daoist and other
intercultural sources, Heidegger’s path proceeds from the paradigmatic Occidental
philosophy of available givenness and mere presence—which conceals the open spacing
of things and seeks to logically exclude and dialectically subordinate negativity and the
nothing—to nothingness, emptiness, and the clearing in their coming to presence and
withdrawal in absence or, to accentuate its mutable verbal sense, presencing-absencing.
The nurturing darkness and mystery of nothingness and the concealing-unconcealing
openness that characterize Heidegger’s thinking of being are, when interpreted as
bearing and ethos, elemental to responsively encountering and dwelling with things
in the world-clearing. Zhuangzi’s vision of free and easy wandering indicates ways of
practicing philosophy as contesting and unraveling fixations. These practices allow
rethinking Heidegger’s pathways and reimagining for ourselves things, nothingness,
and world in the specificity of our existential condition.
 Part One

Dao, Thing, and World

12
 1

Way, Thing, and World in Laozi,

Zhuangzi, and Heidegger

I. Introduction

1. Phenomenology, Daoism, and the Thing

What is a thing? To provide a preliminary description, the thing appears to be that
which presents or manifests itself. Ordinary language and philosophical discourses of
the thing oscillate between the narrow sense of the “mere thing” as available tool and
present object, the epistemic sense of a presently existing object, and the plenitude
of the thing in its way of being. The first sense contrasts things with human beings
and living creatures. The thing is characterized by its accessibility and usefulness.
The second sense signifies anything and everything that exists. In modern German
philosophy, to introduce one example, Hermann Lotze began his metaphysics with
the question of the thing and defined ontology as the study of the real that consists
of things that “are,” and their nexus of events and relations, in contrast to those that
“are not” (Lotze 1879: 1). There is an additional third sense of things in which they are
not merely available for use or present for thought. There is an inkling in moments
of beauty, sublimity, and terror that things and the world have their own sense that
demands attentiveness. The thing places a claim on human language and thought in
these and other moments, calling for patience, reticence, and silence in encountering
it in its plain and unadorned other-power or self-so-ing.
In Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s poetic words, the encounter is with the “reluctant
beauty of small things” (Hofmannsthal 1979: 65). German language poets, such as
Hofmannsthal and Rilke, allowed the thing to shape the words and mood of the
poem. The epistemic and metaphysical thing of theorizing seems barren and deficient
compared with the encountered thing of the poets. Heidegger paired Daoists and poets
to stress their contact with things, being amidst the world, and thoughtfulness that
he adopted as models for thinking. The first five chapters trace the transitions and
implications of Heidegger’s philosophical journey from the instrumental thing of use
and the representational thing as object to the gathering thing keeping in view Daoist
sources of the self-generative creatio continua of the thing.1
14 Heidegger and Dao

His early philosophy of the thing emerged in the context of debates between
idealist and realist philosophies of the thing and his training in phenomenology as
a methodology that describes consciousness and its objects. His teacher Edmund
Husserl described phenomenology as a movement “toward the things [or matters]
themselves” (zu den Sachen selbst), defining the thing (das Ding) in the Philosophy
of Arithmetic (1891) as that which bears characteristics with unity through temporal
and spatial variation and—as what is experienced points back to who experiences—in
Ideas (1913) as the correlational object of intentional consciousness.2
Husserl’s phenomenological strategies produced several dilemmas for Heidegger.
First, the thing would seemingly designate what is most concrete while—in the
thing as object—abstracting away from the specific features and qualities that make
particular things uniquely what they are. Second, given the material, social-historical,
pragmatic, and conceptual mediations of the thing, given the mediated referential and
interpretive nexus through which it is experienced, the thing cannot be simply intuited
and described, yet we (or, at least, some) wish to encounter it as something of its own
that exceeds an anthropocentrically constituted and constructed object.
Phenomenology simultaneously promoted and prevented answering the question
of thing qua thing for Heidegger. He repeatedly reposed the question “what is a thing?”
He inquired in response to these tensions between concrete thing and intentional
object in the context of (1) phenomenologically encountering and describing the thing,
(2) confronting “Occidental” (abendländische) philosophical conceptions of the thing
(particularly in Aristotle and Kant), and—most extraordinarily—(3) engaging the
Daoist emptiness of the thing in the Daodejing, attributed to Laozi, and its uselessness
in the Zhuangzi.3
Before proceeding further, we might want to ask: what is Daoism and why is it
significant for Heidegger and his generation? The expression has a variety of historical
meanings. First, Daoism (daojia 道家) was applied to Laozi in a retrospective
construction and categorization of schools in the Historical Records (Shiji 史記) of
the Han dynasty historians Sima Tan 司馬談 (c. 165–110 bce) and his son Sima
Qian 司馬遷 (c. 140–86 bce) for whom it signified Huanglao 黃老 biopolitical-
cosmological discursive formations. Second, types of “religious Daoism” (daojiao 道教)
emerged during the late and post-Han eras that were associated with biospiritual arts
of internal alchemy (neidan shu 內丹術), the way of immortals (daoxian 道仙), and
the way of spirits/gods (shendao 神道). Third, and most pertinently here, it referred
to the teachings of Laozi and Zhuangzi, whose historical connections are unclear and
controversial, for generations of Chinese literati and modern European intellectuals.
This sense can be designated early, Lao-Zhuang, or ziranist.4
“Ziran” is a key interpretive term throughout this inquiry. What I designate
“ziranism” should not be construed as “naturalism” insofar as naturalism misses what
it would signify by limiting nature to a fixed positioned image in an enframing (i.e.,
positioning into a determining frame) world-picture that deworlds things and human
existence. Ziran is explored as an ethos and interpretive orientation that prioritizes
recognizing the spacing of the thing and the interthingly nexus in their own ways of
manifesting and being. Ziran is “nature” only in the most anti-reductive and expansive
sense of calling for an attuned and responsive comportment and recognition of the
 Way, Thing, and World in Laozi 15

autopoiesis in sympoiesis of the myriad things. Autopoiesis is not applied to but

rather reimagined through Daoist sources, as are other key expressions such as ethos.
It signifies here a dynamic, generative, plural self-formation irreducible to a closed
determinate system (which would exclude questions of ethos and ethics constitutive of
the first- and second-person perspective) or a fixed, essential individual or collective
identity. It indicates the myriad things in their relational self-so-ness, or self-generative
naturing, and interthingly nexus without reduction to restrictive epistemic and
metaphysical constructions of nature and the thing. This book proposes in this light
a ziranist interpretation and critique of Heidegger’s long-standing engagement with
early Daoist sources.

2. The Art of Tea, the Safeguarding Darkness, and the Joy of Fish
When did this encounter begin to emerge? Two anecdotes help answer this question.
An old Japanese anecdote of a gift in 1919 recounts how the young Heidegger initially
encountered Daoist conceptions of the thing and being-in-the-world in the German
edition of The Book of Tea by Okakura Kakuzō 岡倉覚三 (1862–1913). He received
this popular book as a gift in 1919 from Itō Kichinosuke 伊藤吉之助 (1885–1961).5
Okakura fuses motifs from Laozi-Zhuangzi, the Chan/Zen Buddhist dharma, and
Shintō together to draw a picture of the East Asian spirit of tea as it is enacted in
concrete ritual practices that carefully attend to the smallest details of tea, water,
utensils, and environment. One meets the world in a sip of tea.
According to Okakura, the way and art of tea-making and drinking realizes the
Daoist “art of being-in-the-world” (Kunst des In-der-Welt-Seins). This appears to be the
first hyphenated use of this expression in German. It expresses the Daoist awareness
of how self and world are relationally bound together, and it is only in practices that
freedom occurs. Freedom is not a quality of the self but is thoroughly relational. This
Daoist worldly art consists of an ethos of continual adaptation and readjustment to
the environment where one maintains relationships and makes room for things and
others without abandoning one’s position (Okakura 1919: 29). In Okakura’s chapter
on Daoism, he accentuates the role of emptiness (die Leere) in the Daodejing’s imagery
of the spatial vacuum. The reality of the room is found in its emptiness, the usefulness
of the water jug dwells in its emptiness rather than its material form, and emptiness
is all-encompassing as the space and possibility of movement (Okakura 1919: 30).
Conspicuously, and not fortuitously given the historical and linguistic evidence, these
descriptions reverberate throughout Heidegger’s thinking.
A second anecdote tells of Heidegger’s Daoist affinities a decade later in the closing
years of the ill-fated Weimar Republic. Heidegger’s friend, the art critic Heinrich
Wiegand Petzet (1909–1997), recounted how Heidegger visited Bremen in October
1930 to hold the lecture that eventually became “On the Essence of Truth” (Von Wesen
der Wahrheit) that elucidated truth as unconcealment (Petzet 1993: 18). Heidegger
enthusiastically discussed the Daodejing during the lecture and the Zhuangzi at the
subsequent dinner.
Heidegger incorporated the Daodejing into early versions of this pivotal lecture:
“those who know lightness wrap themselves in darkness” (“Der seine Helle kennt,
16 Heidegger and Dao

sich in sein Dunkel hüllt”) (GA 80.1: 370). This is Victor von Strauss’s translation of
an expression (zhi qi bai, shou qi hei 知其白, 守其黑) in chapter 28. It depicts the
sage as a streambed and template image for the world who preserves the feminine in
the masculine, childlikeness in virtue, darkness in light, and dao-like qualities amidst
the mundane world (Strauss 1870: 140; Lou 1980: 74). Heidegger elucidated here the
play of unconcealment-and-concealment, referring to the dao’s movements between
lightness and darkness. In the next sentence, he introduced another expression he
recurrently linked with the Daodejing: “the genuine search is not for that which is
only unveiled, but exactly on the contrary for the mystery (Geheimnis)” (GA 80.1:
370). The freedom of the mystery is the unconcealing-concealing “letting be of beings”
(Seinlassen des Seienden).
Heidegger referred to Strauss’s translation of chapter 28 in the third Freiburg and
Marburg version of the lecture (GA 80.1: 397), in letters and notes, and decades later in
Identity and Difference (GA 11: 138). Indeed, Heidegger persistently returns to Daoist-
inflected thought-images of letting beings and things be themselves, preserving the
darkness that nourishes and regenerates, entering the silence in which genuine hearing
transpires, emptying the heart-mind for the sake of the encounter and event of being
(instead of dao), and the twofold mystery beyond mystery.
Petzet depicts how Heidegger was still pondering Daoist thought-images after his
1930 lecture on truth. Heidegger surprised the attendees of a dinner party by requesting
a copy of a book called the Speeches and Parables of Zhuangzi (Reden und Gleichnisse
des Tschuang-tse). Buber had translated this selection around two decades earlier based
on English translations by Frederic Henry Balfour (1881), Herbert A. Giles (1889), and
James Legge (1891) and it was a familiar book among Weimar era intelligentsia.6 Otto
Pöggeler adds that Heidegger appears to be deeply familiar with Buber’s translation
of the Zhuangzi and perhaps even of his Tales of the Hasidim as well.7 Pöggeler does
not provide sufficient detail here. A second indication of this relationship is that
Buber’s “Afterword” to the Zhuangzi discussed the same sentence concerning darkness
and light from Strauss’s Daodejing. Buber writes of hiddenness (Verborgenheit) and
unhiddenness, the generative hiddenness that nurtures life, speaks to the sages, and
is encountered in abyssal solitude (Buber 2013: 110). According to Buber, enacting
hiddenness in both word and action constitutes the history of Laozi’s teaching.8
Heidegger proceeded to read and interpret the narrative of the joy of fish (yule 魚樂)
from Buber’s translation of the “Autumn Floods” (qiushui 秋水) Zhuangzi chapter.
Zhuangzi (Zhuang Zhou 莊周) and his friend the skeptic Huizi 惠子 (Hui Shi 惠施)
debated possibilities for genuinely recognizing the joy of fish while watching their
playful movements from the bridge above. Richard Wilhelm, whose translation
Heidegger also cites, construed Zhuangzi as offering a Kantian-like critical resolution
of Huizi’s dogmatic “Humean” skepticism (Wilhelm 1912: 9). This scene might be
understood as presenting a skeptical problem of knowledge in which Zhuangzi, a proto-
Wittgenstein, skeptically outdoes Huizi’s skeptical doubts about knowing, throwing
the doubter into doubt. The dogmatic skeptic assumes a priori that one cannot know,
presupposing the game of knowing and not knowing that Wittgenstein exposed in
On Certainty (Wittgenstein 1969), while Zhuangzi freely followed the fish in their
changing movements without anxiously being confined by the game of knowledge
 Way, Thing, and World in Laozi 17

and ignorance. Whereas the dogmatist presumes to inherently grasp the givenness and
essence of things, and the skeptic imagines all is text and interpretative projection,
Zhuangzi recognizes that there can be no fixed borders between interpretation and
world or fish and non-fish. That is, we are not able to establish this distinction in a
fashion that could ground either absolutism or skepticism. Huizi and the dogmatic
skeptic fixate on what is known and not known based on the hypostatization of self and
non-self as isolated substantive identities. But Zhuangzi contests the boundaries of self
and non-self, being or not being a fish, or knowing and not knowing. The Zhuangzian
exemplary genuine person (zhenren 真人) freely adopts to and responsively moves
along with the transformations of perspectives, things, and their own self.
Heidegger appears to have realized that this dialogue concerns intersubjective and
interthingly relations. Petzet describes how, on this evening in Bremen, Heidegger
delved into the implications of this encounter with the otherness of the fish for being-
with (Mitsein).9 Heidegger analyzed being-with as ethically neutral in Being and Time.
Yet this analysis is not ethically indifferent as it discloses forms of ethical and relational
knowledge of self, others, and the world (Kanthack 1958). Did Heidegger construe the
story as an allegory for interhuman encounters? Probably yes, as being-with designates
in Being and Time the sociality of Dasein, in the prospect of an authentic “we” and
in the fallenness of the “they.” It did not encompass relations with—as he described
them in 1929–30—worldless things and world-poor animals. Even so, the inkling
of an alternative way of interacting with—albeit not yet leaping-ahead for the sake
of—animals and things is glimpsed here in 1930, even if it primarily served as an image
for intersubjective interaction. Possibilities of encountering and interacting with living
and nonliving things (i.e., thing in the expansive sense that encompasses any entity)
reoccur in passages in the 1930s (such as in GA 45: 3, 29). They would be radically
transformed in Heidegger’s 1940s engagements with the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi
and postwar philosophy in which he questions the anthropocentric priority of the
human and emphasizes the centrality of the thing vis-à-vis the subject as a moment
and place of gathering world.10

3. The Thing and the Worlding of the World

We do not know how Heidegger specifically responded to Okakura’s The Book of Tea.
The thirty-year-old Heidegger was already thinking in 1919 of the verbal character of
the world, as he sought to depersonalize and verbalize reified substantives in formally
indicative (as he would soon call them) expressions such as “it worlds” (es weltet) and
“it values” (es wertet) introduced in the 1919 lecture-course The Determination of
Philosophy. He proposed there that “living in an environing world, it signifies for me
everywhere and always, it is all worldly, ‘it worlds.’”11 But this worlding character of
the world is suppressed in ordinary experience, and environmental meaningfulness
(das Bedeutungshafte) loses its meaning (ent-deutet). The living-experiencing of
the environing worlding of the world (Umwelt erleben) is de-vitalized or “de-lived”
(ent-lebt). The “it worlds” undergoes processes of substantialization as it is distilled
into and concealed in the objectness of things (res) that René Descartes had divided
into the extended thing (res extensa) and the thinking thing (res cogitans).
18 Heidegger and Dao

Heidegger examined in the next 1919/20 lecture-course Basic Problems of the

Phenomenology how world is engulfed in the reifications of lived-experiences
(Verdinglichungen der Erlebnisse) and the devitalization of life (Entlebung) (GA 58:
183). Reification signifies becoming “thinglike” in Karl Marx’s paradigmatic assertion
that persons become things and things become persons through commodification.
Typically, reification is characterized as a loss of the subject’s sense of being an
active subject and cannot apply to nonhuman beings (e.g., Lukács). But reification
is a fixation in the flow of experience, language, and environment. It is not merely
a lapse by the subject but a systematic loss of relational openness and possibilities.
In Heidegger’s analysis, by contrast, there is also a reification of things (res) and
world. Already in this early lecture-course, the thing is separated from its environing
relational worlding character and posited as an object for the subject. The thing is
“only there as such,” as a correlate of the ego, and reduced to the real as purely existing,
in the distancing theoretical attitude that he attributed to Husserl. Still, “it worlds”
is intimated in specific ways of encountering things in questions such as when one
asks (perhaps in surprise) “What sort of thing is that?” (GA 56/57: 89). The “real”
constructed in idealism, which strives to overcome the fixated “dead thing” with the
life of subjectivity, and in realism, which fixates it as ontic, is impoverished in losing
contact with the superabundance and multiplicity of the life of the thing. The life of the
thing functions as an implicit norm that shaped Heidegger’s early philosophy of the
thing. But the self-emerging thing is increasingly conceived as either a pragmatically
useful or worldless theoretical object.
Things are understood in the lecture-courses of the 1920s as objects of a constrained
notion of immediate external experience and natural scientific and theoretical inquiry
(GA 58: 51). Such objectivizing knowledge of things is an inappropriate modality for
grasping the self-world (GA 58: 223). The reification of relations is extended to the
reflexive nexus of the self-world (which is neither subject nor object) when it is seen
as consisting of an ontic nexus of things in which the self-world loses both its “self ”
and “world” character (GA 58: 232). The self exists in reification when it is subsumed
like a mere thing in this instrumental nexus as a mere object among other objects.
The objectivized neutralized thing as object in his winter semester 1929–30 lecture-
course is said to lack world: “The stone is worldless, without world, has no world”
(GA 29/30: 289). The stone, the stream, and the mountain are not world-disclosive,
not world-events. They are not the worlding of the world of “it worlds” and—unlike in
Heidegger’s later thought—cannot address me or their perceiver.
The object has two primary dimensions, and a third inadequately thought one
of non-anthropocentric nature that haunts Heidegger’s early project and compels
his subsequent turn (GA 2: 70, 211; GA 9: 155). The object is predominantly (1)
instrumentally ready-to-hand (zuhanden) in pragmatic routine in an ontic nexus of
tools and equipment or (2) objectively present-at-hand (vorhanden) for theoretical
inquiry (GA 23: 24). Things as ready-to-hand serve in Being and Time the function
of an instrumental “in order to” (um-zu) in its manipulable handiness (Handlichkeit),
conduciveness (Beiträglichkeit), serviceability (Dienlichkeit), and usability
(Verwendbarkeit) that constitute an equipmental whole (Zeugganzheit) through which
things are encountered as equipment available for routine use (GA 2: 68).
 Way, Thing, and World in Laozi 19

Things are experienced and perceived primarily as objects of use, exchange, and—
as present-at-hand—objective inquiry. Yet things are still beyond this objectification
in a subterranean third dimension that stretches from the life of the thing in 1919
to the few insufficient remarks about the natural thing (Naturding) in the late 1920s
to the thing that gathers, says (Sagen), and addresses me (spricht mich an) in the
1950s. At this juncture, however, the practical referential nexus of significance
(Verweisungszusammenhang der Bedeutsamkeit) determines the world of Dasein,
and the equipmental nexus determines things in their instrumental obtainability to
be used, only interrupted by their uselessness in breakdowns and malfunctions. This
approach is undoubtedly groundbreaking, yet it is not entirely satisfying.
Simply stated, Heidegger’s early version of relational holism centered around the
being-there of human existence and his later version centered around the thing. This
early analysis was inadequate according to his own later remarks that gave greater
priority to the thing as generating the sense of place and world. Emmanuel Levinas
noted how Heidegger’s incomplete account in Being and Time presupposes without
appropriately articulating the elemental as an inappropriable atmosphere and milieu of
air, earth, rain, sunlight, and wind that “suffice for themselves” (Levinas 1969: 132). In
freely wandering, one enjoys the fresh breeze and the sunlight not for a purposive goal
but for themselves, as the stone and the blade of grass appear in the elemental interplay
of light and shadow. Heidegger ignores how the elemental nourishes me and things as
they are encountered in non-purposive enjoyment (jouissance) (Levinas 1969: 134).
Despite the pragmatic instrumental tendencies criticized by Levinas and his later self,
Heidegger’s late 1920s explication of the thing is not merely pragmatic. Even as things
are interpreted as dominated by a referential nexus of usage and usefulness, Heidegger
also analyzes the facticity of interruptive breakdown, disorienting questionability and
uncanniness, and possibilities of other forms of relational attunement in encountering
things. There are moments that point toward a fuller philosophy of the thing.
In the 1935–37 “The Origin of the Work of Art,” the apparently natural thing, the
thing as instrumental equipmental objectness (Zeug, Gebrauchsding), and the work
(Werk) are differentiated as the artwork discloses the thing that bears and opens the
“there” and liberates it from the nexus of instrumentality. The work discloses the
constitutive role of things in the thereness of human existence (GA 82: 484–7). Even
prior to the ostensive turn (a notion Heidegger introduced in his auto-critiques of the
middle and late 1930s) to the poetic thinking and saying of being, there are indications
of intimate relations with things and their life in his account of the atmosphere of
attunement and mood—such as the thing as encountered in situations of extreme utter
boredom (GA 29/30: 132), existential anxiety, resigned indifference, or astonished
wonder—that increasingly draws Heidegger toward poetic and Daoist ways of
addressing and being responsively attuned with the thing in releasing it through
emptiness into its way of being.

4. Releasement and Being on the Way: Ethos without Mysticism

The primary objection against Daoism’s import for Heidegger appeals to German
poets and mystics. Does Heidegger’s embrace of the sensibility of the thing signify a
20 Heidegger and Dao

form of religious mystical experience or poetic “thing-mysticism” (Dingmystik)? The

latter category, popularized by Walther Rehm (1930: 297–358), has been applied to
poets of humility before reality (as in Hofmannsthal or Rilke) and the later Heidegger
who appears to share this sentiment. Heidegger’s thing primarily motivates, without
doubt, the poetics and climate of Heidegger’s discourses; it also, nonetheless, signals an
immanent elemental co-relational ethos. But what of the modern Occidental category
of religious mysticism?
Buber and Heidegger avoid and suggest alternatives to the Orientalist mystical
and occultist appropriations of their era. Buber shifted from mysticism to ethics, a
shift in which Daoist impulses played an underexplored role. We see in Heidegger’s
reflections a justified suspicion of the category of mysticism as he transitions in his
later thinking to ethos or that which is more primordial than ethos. This transformation
involves an intercultural reinterpretation of German mystical and Daoist sources.
Earlier discourses of releasement concerned the soul or the self rather than things.
This is palpable in multiple nineteenth-century and twentieth-century comparative
readings of Laozi and Meister Eckhart. Despite their distinctive contexts, these
sources link Daoist “acting without acting,” or acting from a responsive attunement of
minimal assertion and calculation (wei wuwei 為無為), and Eckhart’s “releasement”
(Gelassenheit) under the banner of mysticism.
Examining such sources reveals how the cross-cultural matching and classification
of meanings within the same linguistic community can arrive at strikingly divergent
results.12 This problematic led Schleiermacher to conclude that hermeneutics
requires both a contextualizing linguistic interpretation as well as an individualizing
psychological interpretation to form a holistic perspective on an author or text
(Schleiermacher 2012). It might be objected that this hermeneutical strategy is overly
reductive. However, although Schleiermacher’s specific interpretive model and its
psychological presuppositions are no longer adequate, interpretation still demands
both contextualizing and particularizing historical and linguistic strategies to elucidate
the said and unsaid of texts and discourses. Secondly, historically and linguistically
situating Heidegger’s thinking, as pursued here, need not lead to mere historiography
and reductive misinterpretation, since it can illuminate the being-historical event and
truth of this thinking while not ignoring its historical complicities and mediations.13
Let us reflect on a few contextualizing examples and digressions that can help situate
this analysis. In his 1870 translation of the Daodejing, Victor von Strauss translated
the “highest vacuity” (xuji 虛極) at the beginning of chapter 16 as the pinnacle of
renunciation (Entäußerung) and, in a note, added that this was what Eckhart called
secluded detachment (Abgeschiedenheit) (Strauss 1870: 85). The German American
public philosopher and pioneering intercultural thinker Paul Carus identified the
simplicity, quietude, and unity of Laozi and Eckhart in the introduction to his 1898
English edition of the Daodejing (Carus 1898: 24). It was in the comparative religious
works of the theologians Hermann Mandel and Friedrich Heiler that Laozi’s wuwei
and Eckhart’s Gelassenheit were interpreted as ways of emptying the soul (Mandel
1912: 256; Heiler 1918: 252).
The transcultural linking of Gelassenheit with the Daodejing is not new with
Heidegger. The expressions Gelassenheit and, more frequently, gelassen are already
 Way, Thing, and World in Laozi 21

found in German editions familiar to Heidegger to refer to a calm undisturbed

quietude, such as the Daodejing translations of Strauss and Wilhelm and the Zhuangzi
editions of Buber and Wilhelm.14 This expression is also seen in the commentary of
other renditions published during the Weimar Republic. Hertha Federmann’s 1920 Tao
teh king compares it with the inaction of the divine releasement of the Neo-Platonic one
and with Martin Luther’s justification through faith in contrast to justification through
works (Federmann 1920: 95). Although the Daodejing is about how sage-kings and sages
relate to things through nonaction and affairs (shi 事) through nonentanglement, these
comparisons shaped by modern Occidental constructs of mysticism and spiritualism
are not primarily concerned with things and the interthingly nature of reality.
The thing orientation of Heidegger’s conception of releasement is notably different
than typical mystical discussions that accentuate soul and self, including German
mystical discourses and the early German translations of Daoist classics accessible
to Heidegger. Heidegger’s releasement is without doubt informed by its senses in
Eckhart, Jakob Böhme, and German mystical traditions. Gelassenheit is understood
there as the calmness and serenity of the self that takes precedence over Gelassenheit
as the freedom—not of self and God but—of worldly things. The latter sense denotes
freedom as a generative, relational, and interthingly participation between existents
without any need for assertion or affirmation. Heidegger insisted on Eckhart’s
centrality, whose works he read since 1910, when Paul Shih-yi Hsiao (Xiao Shiyi 蕭師
毅, 1911–1986) and Karl Jaspers asserted the Daoist and Asian resonances of his later
thinking of the clearing of being.15 Nonetheless, as a bearing (Haltung) related to the
self-becoming and self-essencing of things, instead of the self mystically uniting with
God, Heidegger does more than evoke Daoist wuwei that was already long associated
with the French word laisser as early as the physiocrats and the German word lassen
since the nineteenth century. Wuwei is a letting that is frequently conjoined with things
and affairs in the world such that it does not only signify a minimal activity of the self,
much less a sinking of the self into itself and God. Wuwei is minimalism in an art or
way of being-in-the-world that releases and responds to affairs and things in their self-
happening (ziwei 自為).16
There are several indications yet to be elucidated that the Laozi and Zhuangzi
provide not only historical raw data or content but orientational guiding models of what
Heidegger designates poetic thinking that is closer to the happening and unconcealing
of truth than philosophy as metaphysics, onto-theology, and positivistic technique.
Laozi and Zhuangzi consequently appear to have an exemplary status alongside the
more frequently discussed Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Hölderlin.
Poetic ways of thinking and saying indicate possibilities of—as Heidegger articulates in
a 1955 talk—a responsively attuned disposition and way in “the releasement of things”
and “openness for the mystery” in contrast to the bureaucratic and technological
reduction of persons and things to instrumentalized usefulness.17 As an opening
association with things and mystery, it evokes if not directly utters the noncoercive
or receptive doing of Daodejing 64 as well as the “mystery upon mystery” (xuanzhi
youxuan 玄之又玄) of Daodejing 1 (Lou 1980: 2, 165–6). He directly contemplates
Laozi’s utmost mystery enfolded in mystery (Geheimnis aller Geheimnisse) in the
1957–58 Freiburg lectures “The Essence of Language.”18
22 Heidegger and Dao

Heidegger’s articulation of releasement has a distinctive tone and ethos in

emphasizing the relationship with things in addition to one’s dispositional
comportment, a connection that is found in the Daodejing. Chapter 64 distinguishes two
modalities that correlate with Heidegger’s early conception of intrahuman being-with
and his later conception of dwelling with things. This chapter describes neither acting
nor intervening in affairs (in human relations, not leaping-in) while simultaneously
assisting the myriad varieties of things in their self-nature (in human relations,
leaping-ahead).19 In the situation of Heidegger’s early thought, the solicitude (Fürsorge)
of not leaping-in (einspringen) to take away but leaping-ahead (vorspringen) to assist
individuation analyzed in Being and Time matches such passages in the Daodejing
except that it is restricted to intrahuman being-with. Heidegger’s later thought extends
this relationality beyond the human sphere. It is expansive in contrast with the still
too anthropocentric model of Being and Time in rethinking being-with and language
regarding things. Not only do human others have their unique ways of being and paths
of individuation. Things have their own concealed mystery, revealed in stillness, in
their showing forth that calls for reticence, releasement, and responsiveness.
Heidegger’s transformation is shaped by his persistent engagements with early
Daoist sources. Drawing on his co-translation of the Daodejing with Paul Shih-yi Hsiao,
who attended his Heraclitus and Parmenides lecture-courses in 1943–44, Heidegger
describes in other writings both Gelassenheit and dao in the same language of “way”
as a bringing underway (auf den Weg bringen) and moving on the way (Be-wegung).20
Letting (Lassen) is a genuine bringing about (zuwege bringen) and releasement
(Gelassenheit) into the essencing of the thing (GA 99: 31, 41). They concern the
worlding of the thing and not merely a subjective human comportment (GA 99: 40).
As examined throughout Part One, Heidegger’s most groundbreaking turning is not
the way from being to beings in the mid-1930s, but his twists and turns through his
confrontation with the philosophy of the will that emerges in the late 1930s toward the
releasement of thing and world in emptiness in the 1940s. In his mature conception of
releasement after 1943 his thought shifts away from the self ’s dispositional state toward
the priority of the thing. It is during this same period that he detected a connection
between his own problematic of technology and releasement, of instrumentally
enframed things and self-so things, and the texts ascribed to Laozi and Zhuangzi that
is unfolded from 1943 (GA 75: 43) through his final reflections (GA 91: 667).21

II. The Thing and Self- and World-Naturing

5. Wu 物 as Sacrificial, Ritual, and Patterned Event

Two Chinese books caught Heidegger’s attention during the Weimar Republic—to
which he returned with renewed dedication in the closing years of the Second World
War—through Okakura Kakuzō’s reflections on Daoism and tea (in which the thing
is natural as well as artistically sensed and cultivated) and the translations of Wilhelm
(Laozi and Zhuangzi), Strauss (Laozi), Buber (Zhuangzi), and perhaps others such as
Federmann (Laozi).22
 Way, Thing, and World in Laozi 23

Before returning to Heidegger’s thing below, two preparatory questions should be

posed: what were the early Chinese and Daoist senses of the thing such that they could
eventually interest Heidegger and his generation?23 And what are these senses on their
own terms that can help us to reevaluate Heidegger’s discourse of the thing?
The early formation of the Sinitic language during the Shang dynastic period
(c. 1600–1046 bce) is interlinked with practices of divination, ritual, and sacrifice.24
Etymology, their shifts in meanings and contexts, and linguistic and experiential
positionality help clarify words and the senses they have gained and lost. The earliest
identified uses of wu 物 in Shang divination inscriptions signified a speckled cow killed
in sacrifice.25 The character “物” combines the radicals for cow (niu 牛) and to cut/
blood on the knife (wu 勿) associated with sacrificial ritual practice, and etymologically
its early meaning was any type of moveable entity used in ritual sacrifices.26 Sacrifice
meant the death and destruction of the specific thing and the continued reproduction
of things and the cosmic ritual order as a whole.
This sacrificial and ritual context is significant for the development of early Chinese
conceptions of the thing and its forms of world-disclosure. A sacrificial entity has its
allotted time culminating in the ritual cosmic event of its sacrifice. The expression wu
became interlinked with the arising, persisting, and disappearing of the thing in its
own allotted time and with what is changing and perishable. Wu indicates accordingly
a temporalizing duration as the thing is depicted in subsequent sources as formed in
flow (liu 流) and transformation (hua).
The excavated manuscript All Things Flow in Form (Fan Wu Liu Xing 凡物流形)
from the Warring States period provides an example of the flowing and temporalizing
character of the thing.27 The text begins by posing two questions: how do things flow
into taking form and shape? How does the thing inexorably dissipate after having
taken on form? Given the mutability and conflict of contrary vital powers, the author
of the text inquires, how do constant forces operate generating form and the thing and
then disperse? That is, how is the thing individuated and fixed for a time? Wu expresses
a temporalizing formation of a changing finite form between birth and death. The
momentarily persisting thing expresses a cosmological order that transpires through
the flow of elemental primordial forces (qi 氣) and is regulated through “natural” or
“heavenly” criteria (tiandu 天度): “The hundred things do not perish as they depart
and return, dissipate and remerge.”28
Along with generation and transformation, carving and cutting, and leaving
uncarved and uncut, are images that reappear in early Chinese philosophy. The thing
was carved away from the whole of things as a particularized form in an early form of
abstraction and fixation. Yet the microcosmic thing was aligned with a macrocosmic
harmony and ritual order as is evident in the early classics and “Confucian” erudite
(rujia 儒家) sources. The semantic range of wu unfolded to include concrete forms such
as color, person, natural phenomena, living creatures (specified as shengwu 生物), and
the nonliving thing. Wu indicated by the late spring and autumn (chunqiu 春秋) period
“a thing” no longer specifically bound to sacrificial practices while often retaining an
interconnection with a ritually reproduced cosmic order (Pines 2002: 697–8).
There are, undoubtedly, diverse ways of contesting stratified dualities. A specific
interpretation of Nietzschean genealogy envisions the origin as fatefully determining
24 Heidegger and Dao

and implicitly governing all permeations: a religion born of cruelty remains cruel even
in its highest moments of love and tolerance. But his point does not only concern
“lowly origins.” As Nietzsche’s critique exposes, the highest ideas of love and tolerance
function not only as masks but as justifications for hatred and destruction against
those considered other and deemed unworthy of this totalizing love; as when Christian
universal love results in frenzied pogroms against stubbornly resistant particularity
that is posited as the negation of love. However, early Chinese genealogical thinking of
origins is concerned with different issues. It embraces all things in their differences and
transformations. It recognizes that things arise in transitional incipience (ji 幾): they
are born small and low, rise and face their zenith, and descend back into their origins.
Genealogy can trace transformations that suspend and reverse the initial meaning: the
sacrificial entity becomes its opposite by being linked with self-becoming in an ethos,
irreducible to fixed rules and virtues, of nourishing living and nonliving things. How
did this transformation occur?
The history of the thing in early Chinese philosophy offers several clues. First, wu
designated a naturally arising thing, and reality consisted of “all things” (baiwu 百物,
literally “hundred things”) in early Confucian sources and the “myriad things” (wanwu
萬物, literally “ten thousand things”) in the literature that informed the Daodejing’s
development. Early Confucian and Daoist texts can be distinguished to an extent by
the uses of baiwu and wanwu to express the entirety of things. The former is more
characteristic of extant early Confucian materials, although not later ones such as the
Xunzi 荀子 that presupposes and critiques Lao-Zhuang discursive formations, and the
latter of extant Laoist materials in which the phrase baiwu does not appear.
The early Confucian “all things” expressed both the temporal and the ritual
character of the thing. In the Analects’ Yang Huo 陽貨 chapter, section 19, Confucius
(Kongzi 孔子) famously asks, “[H]ow does heaven speak at all as the four seasons
follow their courses and all things arise?”29 Seasons and things take their generational
turns, as seasonality serves as the principal image of time in the Book of Changes (Yijing
易經) and other early Chinese sources.30 The ritual and cosmic character of the thing
is expressed in early sources such as the Book of Rites (Liji 禮記). In its nineteenth
chapter, the Record of Music (Yueji 樂記) sections 12 and 14 (2.3 and 2.5), “all things”
are portrayed as constituting a fluctuating harmonizing whole maintained through a
ritual and sacrificial order that is enacted through music and rites (Cook 1995: 45, 47).
In music as in natural harmony, things transform, discord, and are reconciled. In ritual
as in natural order, each thing finds its appropriate place and role. Music and ritual are
consequently exemplary models of governance that reproduce cosmic harmony and
maintain its order.31 For Xunzi, ‘thing’ is the most general and inclusive name.
Early Confucianism accordingly demanded looking at and reflecting on worldly
things. In the “Expansive Learning” (daxue 大學) chapter of the Book of Rites, the
“extension of knowing” (zhizhi 致知) in the “investigation of things” (gewu 格物)
implies discovering their ritual role and order in self-cultivation (shenxiu 身修).
Song-Ming Neo-Confucianism offers its own distinctive discourses of the thing. Zhu
Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200) construed the inquiry into things as an experiential inquiry
aiming at the clarification of the fundamental cosmological pattern and principle
(li 理) that organizes vital material and bodily forces (qi) and constitutes the order
 Way, Thing, and World in Laozi 25

of things. The Song era Neo-Confucian philosophy of “investigating things and

extending knowledge” (gewu zhizhi 格物致知) advocated by Zhu Xi to comprehend
the patterning principle that configures vital forces to explain the thing is a movement
away from the ziranist thing as it is of itself.
The history of ancient and medieval Chinese philosophical discourses reveals
shared overlapping yet distinctively deployed vocabularies and interpretive strategies
formed in interpretive conflicts concerning the thing and its onto-cosmological
significance. They do not have one idea of what it is to be a thing. In non-ziranist
discourses, the thing is an object of technique and mastery to be reshaped, used, and
consumed; in others, it is secondary to the investigation and self-knowing of the heart-
mind. There are sacrificial, ritual, and patterning principle cosmological explanations
of things. We now turn to the principal focus of this work, the ziranist elucidations of
the thing, as having its own self-generating sense as a transitioning relational nexus,
articulated in the Laozi, the Zhuangzi, and related excavated and transmitted sources.

6. Straw-Dogs and Ziranist Models of the Myriad Things

How then is the self as being-in-the-world disposed and attuned to things in Lao-
Zhuang discourses? Different models of nourishing the self and nurturing things occur
in the texts attributed to the enigmatic figures of Laozi and Zhuangzi, each revealing
distinct constellations between self and the thing, temporality, and the cosmos.
The received rendition of the Daodejing retains connections between the thing and
sacrifice, temporal duration, and cosmic ritual order. One passage evokes both the
sacrificial role of things and their own generational life. In Daodejing 5, heaven and
earth are described as “lacking benevolence and regarding the myriad things like straw-
dogs” (天地不仁, 以萬物為芻狗). This passage has been interpreted as conveying the
sage’s neutral indifference or even a cruel sacrificial inhumaneness toward things and
people. It has also been read as having an ethical meaning. It was explicated in the
Xiang’er 想爾 commentary (c. 190–220 ce) in moralistic language as asserting “the
good with humaneness and the bad without humaneness” (仁於諸善, 不仁於諸惡).
This commentary made sense of the passage by correlating the nurturing aspects of
dao with being in accordance with it and its indifferent aspects with lack of accordance.
The sacrificial straw-dog served accordingly as a warning established by the Yellow
Emperor (Huangdi 黃帝) of people’s futile and useless expenditure of vital forces and
life as they increase and destroy themselves and heaven does not hear them as they fail
to integrate their natural vital substance in accord with the heavenly.32
The image of the straw-dog appears to evoke cruelty and indifference in
contemporary readers yet indicates the appropriate and inappropriate timing of the
life of the thing. It is exemplary of the temporal event of the thing in its gathering and
dispersing. The thing in its self-unfolding gathering cannot be fittingly encountered
if it is conceived as a static objectified identity and presence or according to a
predetermined instrumental use and purpose. A drastically different sense of the
thing’s import is expressed in the Zhuangzi. As expressly noted in one of the narratives
regarding Confucius in the Zhuangzi’s “Heavenly Revolutions” (Tianyun 天運) outer
chapter, “straw-dog” (chugou 芻狗) is a sacrificial object that is elegantly clothed and
26 Heidegger and Dao

taken care of during the duration of the ritual and afterward left aside and trampled
back into the earth or used for kindling (Ziporyn 2020: 121). The figure of the straw-
dog in the Laozi and the Zhuangzi serves as an image of the generational life and death
of the thing.33 The Tianyun chapter clarifies this sense as it then equates Confucian
teachings to a flawed endeavor to preserve the scattered remnants of the straw-dog
after their allotted time has passed. The pursuit to hold on to the dead and the past can
only result in the living being haunted by nightmares.
Notwithstanding the sense of temporality conveyed in the “all things” passage
considered previously above, Confucius in the Tianyun could not adequately recognize
the generational revolving nature of things as events or moments in time that form
and dissipate in transformation. Rituality, righteousness, law, and measure alter over
time (禮義法度者, 應時而變者). The straw-dog functioning as the image of the thing
discloses a world and its criteria in incessant generation, formation, and dissolution.
The excavation and study of pre-Qin to early Han silk and bamboo texts have
revolutionized the study of early Chinese thought. They have proven the antiquity of
the Laozi materials that contain small yet notable differences. The close connection
between thing, generation, and transformation is expressed in the excavated Guodian
郭店 (c. 300 bce) and Mawangdui 馬王堆 (c. 200 bce) renditions of the Laozi. These
materials indicate more complex configurations of the thing operative in the early
“Laoist” context, as the thing is related to the reflexive “self ” or “so of itself ” (zi 自) in
expressions that can be translated as the self-so-ing, self-transforming, self-steadying,
and “self-guesting” of the myriad things.34

7. The Self-Naturing of the Thing

What is the early significance of the character for “self ” and “of itself ” used in such
expressions? It is thought to initially signify the nose and is used in Shang oracle
inscriptions to signify “to start from.” Concerning the thing, it refers to the face and
point of departure of the thing. The impersonal self-relational zi is not the personal
self of human agency, identity, or subjectivity (wo 我). It encompasses cosmic, human,
animal, and material entities. It signifies not only the “my ownness” (Jemeinigkeit) of
the self-world phenomenologically described by Heidegger but the “its ownness” of
each thing-world. Unlike ordinary English and German language usage, the thing (wu)
encompasses sentient and insentient beings, and each thing has its own way of being
itself (zi). The thing’s own self-relational self-world (expressed in zi- expressions in the
Chinese context) is not considered in Heidegger’s early thought, where the thing is
experienced as either instrumentally ready-to-hand (zuhanden) or objectively present-
at-hand (vorhanden), nor is it fully articulated in his later thinking, evocative of early
Daoist sources, of the responsive remembering (das andenkende Denken) of the thing
in writings such as the 1950 essay “The Thing” examined in later chapters.
Early Chinese philosophy, as seen in the early strata of the Book of Changes, was
inspired by the constantly changing natural, spiritual, and sacrificial world. The language
of the thing and the self-occurring both originate in the context of ritual sacrifice.
The natural and sacrificial orders were initially the same. The “ran” of ziran appears
to initially refer to the spirit of the thing in its ritual burning, or what remains in its
 Way, Thing, and World in Laozi 27

sacrificial transformation, and later identifies only the naturally changing thing. Ziran
signifies the temporal transformative self-so in early Daoism and is subsequently fixed
and objectified into nature as object. In its earlier senses, it does not so much name
an object or set of objects (“nature”) as much as the way in which something verbally
(“naturing”) and adverbially (“naturally”) occurs in its movements (compare Liu
2015: 75). The discourse of the myriad things and self-naturing appears to have been
systematically articulated initially in the Laozi materials, functioning as its key concepts
and becoming fundamental to ensuing Chinese philosophy, bioethical life, and aesthetic
culture.
Lao-Zhuang discourses, despite their differences, can well be described as ziranist
given their recognition of the priority of ziran and the inadequacy of translating it as
naturalism. The conclusion to Daodejing 25 (in Guodian A 11) asserts that ziran is the
key to understanding the way: dao follows or patterns itself according to its own self-
naturing (daofa ziran 道法自然). The late Han era Heshanggong (河上公, Riverside
Elder) commentary describes how this means that dao follows its own naturing
(daoxing ziran 道性自然). The myriad things are self-sufficient in their self-becoming
and self-accomplishing (wanwu zicheng 萬物自成).35
The rediscovered Heng Xian 恆先 text (300 bce) regards letting the thing happen
(wuwei)—in “neither avoiding nor partaking in it” (無舍也, 無與也)—as an
accordance with the thing’s self-happening (ziwei 自為).36 Does the early history of the
thing’s “selfing” or “self-so-ing” (zi) imply that the sage-kings and sages do or do not
step back and assist the thing in allowing it to determinate itself? Both possibilities of
responsive nurturing and neutral indifference are implied in different renditions and
interpretations of the Laozi, an assembled source formed from a textual and interpretive
multiplicity. There are noticeable differences between the Guodian and received Laozi
texts that some translations accentuate more than others. In Guodian A 6, according
to Henricks’s translation, the ancient sages are “able” (the first use of neng 能) yet are
“unable to act” (its second use in funeng wei 弗能為), allowing the myriad things
to be themselves in their own self-so-ing or self-naturing.37 In Daodejing 64, and in
Cook’s translation of A 6 (Cook 2012: 245), the sages do not dare to (coercively or
calculatedly) act (fu gan wei 弗敢為) while they expressly complement or assist (fu 輔)
the myriad things to be themselves.38 That is, the exemplary sages act and do not act by
assisting and nourishing the life of things without forced purposive intervention that
is constrained and undone by the restrictions of its aims.
Guodian A 6 could be read as implicitly stating the same message as Daodejing
64 if its first use of “able” implies able to complement and its second use unable to
coercively act (Cook 2012: 245). It could also be read to suggest the neutrality of
following dao with respect to the self-generative naturing of things, a model found in
Huanglao 黃老 and so-called “legalist” (fajia 法家) discourses.39 The received version
of Daodejing 64 indicates a correlational co-responsive attunement without compelled
or artificial action (wei) in following dao in its caring, maternal, and nurturing
functions by complementing and assisting things to occur as themselves.40 The
nurturing function that supports self-nurturing applies to persons as well as things.
Guodian A 16 and Daodejing 57 describe how the sage-kings practice noninvolvement
in affairs, non-doing, quieting, and desiring without desiring as the people self-enrich,
28 Heidegger and Dao

self-transform, self-rectify, and self-simplify of their own accord.41 How does the
sage-king let the inevitably myriad and plural people order themselves? According to
chapter 49, the sages empty and have no invariable heart-mind of their own to impose
on others; they responsively take the people’s heart-mind as their own. They do not
preferentially prejudge, treating the good and bad, the sincere and insincere alike.42
Heidegger’s distinction between the two extremes of solicitude (Fürsorge) in Being
and Time reminds us of Okakura’s description of Daoism as making place for others.
Heidegger differentiates care as (1) leaping-ahead and liberating (vorspringend-
befreiend) for the sake of promoting the other’s self-care and self-individuation, that
is, potentiality-for-being (Seinskönnen) of an individuated self and (2) leaping-in and
dominating (einspringend-beherrschenden) so as to strip away the other’s self-care and
thus possibilities of self-individuation.43 Unlike Okakura’s description of Daoism, this
making place for others applies exclusively to human being-with in Being and Time.
We will inquire later whether Heidegger eventually arrives at a making place of living
and nonliving things that intersects with the self-happening of the thing revealed in
the Laozi. What then of the thing’s temporality?
The opening lines of Guodian A 7 and Daodejing 37 express the temporalizing
constancy of dao’s operating without purposive activity as things transform themselves
(zihua 自化) and determine and settle themselves (ziding 自定). Lords and kings
emulate dao in knowing the limits of what is sufficient and in quietude. The constancy
of dao is described respectively as daoheng 道恆 and daochang 道常. Heng was
tabooed, as part of the given name (Liu Heng 劉恆) of the fifth Han dynasty emperor,
and altered to the semantically overlapping chang. Neither word designates an eternity
outside of time but rather extended and potentially infinite duration.
The earlier usage of heng signifies the temporalizing of the waxing moon and a
fecund generative and potentially infinite perpetuity; chang the temporality of
continuing and extending regularity.44 The moon goes through its phases, the earth its
seasons, and the repeating pattern is extended. The temporalizing of constancy is not
an indeterminate neutral arena. It is one wherein vital forces and things wax and wane
according to their own natures. Heng signifies persevering, long continuance, and
prosperity in the explication of the thirty-second hexagram of the Book of Changes.
If heng is interpreted as a generative temporalizing according to its early sense, then
the affective dispositional state (daqing 大情) of continuing and prospering things
(hengwu 恆物)—often translated as the enduring reality of the eternal thing from
Legge to Ziporyn—should be noted in the “Great Teacher” (Da Zongshi 大宗師)
chapter of the Zhuangzi: “to hide the world in the world, so that there is no place to
escape, is the great affection that prospers things.”45
The Daodejing teaches the generative and nourishing function of dao that sages and
kings emulate. This is not unrelated to the sacrificial sense in a text such as Mawangdui
Laozi A 13. It states, “the way generates” (daosheng zhi 道生之) and “virtuosity
nourishes” (dexu zhi 德畜之) “governed things” (wuxing zhi 物刑之) and “useful
devices” (qicheng zhi 器成之). The corresponding line in Daodejing 51 reads that they
generate and nourish “formed things” (wuxing zhi 物形之) and “potentiality” (shicheng
zhi 勢成之). While characters such as xing 刑 (to punish, govern, or form), xing 型
(model, formed pattern), and xing 形 (form, shape) were linguistically interchangeable
 Way, Thing, and World in Laozi 29

characters in antiquity, the different characters in A 13 intimate two different forms

of order expressed in the succeeding lines. Generative dao operates in Mawangdui
A 13 through “ceaseless self-offering” (heng ziji 恆自祭) instead of the more typical (in
other renditions) “constant self-naturing” (chang ziran 常自然).
The language of Mawangdui A 13 hearkens to the older sacrificial signification of
thing with its discourse of governing/punishing things, useful instrumental products,
and self-offering/sacrifice. It also points toward the ziran of the thing. In the expression
ziran, “ran” indicates temporalizing self-generativity, the entity’s being self-so in its
own temporal moment of life. This is not an underlying essence or constant substance
but an arising and dissipating nexus of relations calling for our humility and gratitude
to recognize it. Pertinently, ran is etymologically related to burn, or ignite, referring to
sacrificial burnt meat. Again, early Daoist sources show a movement from the earlier
sacrificial meaning to the integral meaning of the moment of life. In both cases, the
temporality of the thing and its relation to the cosmic whole of dao is elemental. The
way generates and nourishes the life of things, allowing them their determinations
and transformations, and their own significance in life and death. The kings and sages
emulate and participate in the generative temporalizing of dao by complementing
and nurturing things in their life and letting them depart in their death. This
intergenerational ziranist ethos entails that each generation has meaning in its own
finitude and in allowing the old to be buried and the new to be born. Such moments in
early Chinese thought intersect with the thinking of natality, generation, and mortality
in Wilhelm Dilthey (an earlier thinker of finitude and generation), Heidegger, and
Hannah Arendt.
The Heng Xian further contextualizes the senses of constancy operative in the
Guodian Laozi. The opening line asserts that in the originary state of constancy (heng),
there is no being (hengxian wuyou 恆先無有).46 This contested line could be understood
as the nothingness of or—as it has no spatial or temporal differentiation—prior to
primordial constancy. Spatiality arises from emptiness and temporality arises from
beginning such that the vital generative forces are self-generating and self-arising
(氣是自生自作) and things self-reproducing and self-reverting (zifu 自復).47 Given
subsequent interpretations of the generativity of nothingness, it could indicate the
generative spatializing and temporalizing of being emerging from emptiness and
beginning from nothingness as the indistinct and muddled is differentiated and
individuated into the temporalizing being of primal forces, things, and names that
each has its own time. This resonates with the much later “Heaven’s Portents” (Tianrui
天瑞) chapter of the Liezi 列子 (c. 300 ce, although incorporating earlier materials),
in which the initial state of things is described as muddled without separation (萬物
相渾淪而未相離) and the temporality of things as one of generative metamorphosis
(wanwu huasheng 萬物化生).
Guodian A 10 and Daodejing 32 state that “[s]hould lords and kings be able to
uphold [the way], the myriad things will bring themselves in line.”48 The myriad things
are self-ordering. More literally, zi 自 refers to self and bin 賓 visitor or guest. The
lords and kings allow the thing to be the guest of itself, allowing the thing to occur
in its own course. Its own course has been interpreted as its way of being or role in
the moral-political order of things. The Heshanggong commentary takes being a guest
30 Heidegger and Dao

as spontaneous moral obedience and submission (fucong yude 服從於德).49 Wang

Bi elucidates in his commentaries on Daodejing 10 and 32 the functioning of the
self-relation of things as a condition of the self-sufficiency, self-tranquility, and self-
contentment of things. The sovereign ruler nurtures them to this condition guided by
the example of dao.50
The early Laozi materials do not radically differentiate between interacting with
things and persons, as persons appear as a special case of rather than an exception
to things. The Laozian ethos of the sage’s letting and the thing’s naturing or selfing is
articulated in Guodian 16 (Daodejing 57): “I engage in no affairs and the people are
self-enriching. I do not (coercively) act and the people are self-transforming. I practice
quietude and the people are self-rectifying. I desire without desiring and the people
self-simplify.”51 Letting, quieting, and simplifying, concomitant with the self-becoming
of things on their own, are in the context of the Laozi practices of the self and political
rule that have multifaceted relations with Daoist biospiritual meditative practices as
well as Huanglao, so-called power-oriented “legalist” (in the work attributed to Hanfei
韓非 with its “Sovereign’s Way” chapter and two chapters on the Laozi), and anarchic
(in Zhuangzi, Liezi, and Bao Jingyan 鮑敬言) biopolitical models that contest and
dispel supremacist identarian configurations of the political.52

III. Freedom, Allotment, and Self-Naturing after the Zhuangzi

8. Freedom and Fate in Self- and World-Naturing

Ziranist Daoism is a philosophy of radical relational freedom and responsive
participation in the world. But, as reversal is part of the very movement of things and
any constellation can assume an ideological form, freedom is perpetually betrayed.
It can fall into obsessive fixation or indifferent fatalism, and anarchy into totalitarian
order (i.e., strong holism suppressing alterity and singularity), as the highest values
devalue themselves. In this section, and in Chapter 4, we consider the larger context
and consequences of Zhuangzian freedom that would eventually inspire Heidegger,
for whom “freedom is admittance into the disclosure of beings as such” (GA 9: 192),
and that allows us to critically and interculturally resituate this discourse of worldly
freedom amidst things.
What is the context and status of the Zhuangzi with its radical teaching of anarchic,
immanent, this-worldly freedom amidst the facticity of existence? The Han dynasty
historian Sima Qian in the Shiji 史記 affiliates Zhuangzi with Laozi, stating that he
illustrates the same teaching through metaphor and parody. Although the relationship
between the Laozi and Zhuangzi remains historically unclear, and they should not
be conflated given their differences, these two collections are related in expressing
variations on the prominence of the self-naturing (ziran) of things disclosed through
noncoercive responsive attunement (wuwei).53 Ziran only occurs ten times in the
Zhuangzi, and the ethos of the self-letting/other-selfing correlation is often conveyed in
other zi- expressions and in the enactment of responsive resonance (ying 應) with the
thing. While ying is only used twice in the ordinary sense of reply or response in the
 Way, Thing, and World in Laozi 31

Daodejing, it has a more vital role in the Zhuangzi and in the Heshanggong and Wang
Bi Laozi commentaries. The sages respond when affected (gan erhou ying 感而後
應) in Zhuangzi chapter 15 “Engraved Meanings” (Keyi 刻意). This chapter concerns
undoing engraved meanings as constructed fixations.
The freedom and ease of worldly responsiveness of the exemplary genuine person
arise through bracketing intentional calculative action (wuwei) and attuned or
resonant being affected (ying). This is glimpsed in the thought-images of Butcher Ding
(Paoding 庖丁) nourishing life and responding to the intrinsic nature of the ox with
the cutting of his blade or (in an example Heidegger referred to in a 1960 lecture on art)
the woodcutter’s responsive working with the wood.54 Such responsiveness has been
understood in early Chinese interpretations as (1) an undetermined free wandering
and sojourning; (2) an uncoerced music-like attunement with the thing and its
situation; (3) a (more or less deterministic) process of adaptation and accommodation
to things; or (4) an automatic reflex fatalistically determined by the stimulus.
First, given their blending of indifference and responsiveness, how are sages
and persons affected to respond by stimuli? The Wei-Jin period saw a controversy
over the emotions of sages concerning whether they completely overcame them in
affective indifference (He Yan 何晏, c. 190–249 ce) or harmoniously balanced them
from nothingness (Wang Bi). As considered below, responsive resonance as attuned
releasement in Chinese philosophical and artistic traditions resituates the subject
and subjectivity. It suggests other modalities of being affected and attuned by things
to Heidegger’s conception of Befindlichkeit (attunement, disposedness) manifested
through Stimmung (mood) through which things and world are disclosed in his
examples of encounters with disorienting disrelational limit-situations of radical
anxiety, profound boredom, as well as other oriented situations of joy, love, wonder,
and—in a complex mediated way—the poetic word and saying of his later thought.55
Secondly, given the stimulus-response model, how should freedom and
determination be understood? Zhuangzian freedom has appealed to intellectuals
searching for an alternative relational freedom distinct from German ideas of freedom
as embracing duty, necessity, and the state. It has been construed as an effortless
playful freedom that is independent of while responsive to things, as an adjusting and
adaptation to the self-nature of the thing and its interbodily and interthingly situation
or as the tranquil acceptance of the vicissitudes of one’s particular fated allotment and
whatever alteration of life and death might transpire. Adaptation raises questions,
articulated in Count Hermann von Keyserling’s 1919 A Travel Diary of a Philosopher,
concerning whether Daoist adaptation to changing circumstances is external or whole
(encompassing one’s internal and external comportment), whether it is genuine
freedom or subordination to an objective depersonalizing world order.56 The Sinologist
F. E. A. Krause more carefully differentiates strains of Daoism in his 1923 work on East
Asian philosophies and religions, identifying moments of the Zhuangzi and the Liezi
with “practical fatalism.”57
In addition to the remarkable appearance of J. G. Weiss’s 1927 Daodejing
edition in the second 1942 leaflet of the White Rose student resistance movement,
which emphasized good governance through the noncoercive self-ordering of
affairs, others linked the Zhuangzi with anti-totalitarian freedom.58 As stated in
32 Heidegger and Dao

a 1942 Sinica article by the Sinologist Werner Eichhorn, to give an example of the
hermeneutics of freedom and fatedness in the Zhuangzi in Heidegger’s linguistic
situation, dao signifies the freedom (ziran) of things in principle (Eichhorn 1942:
141). This profoundly relational freedom is opposed to linguistic and conceptual
essences and fixations such that Daoism is fundamentally incommensurable with
“Occidental” philosophy. The dao-ness of the thing can only be measured according
to and by following its changing behaviors in the comportment of wuwei (Eichhorn
1942: 142). This freedom of the dao, as fallen in the ordinary world, is concealed in
the entanglements and affairs of that world in which things appear lifeless and fixed
and destiny as inescapably fated without free and easy responsiveness. The perspective
of freedom is blurred in the perspective of differentiation and determination. The
exemplary Daoist way of life in freedom and releasement has its own critical and
transformative potential vis-à-vis the reification and alienation reproduced by the
existing social-political order. These critical categories unfolded in Marxist and
existential transmissions, including—on some readings—Heidegger’s Being and Time,
take on new senses in relation to Daoism.
Axel Honneth and Rahel Jaeggi defined reification and alienation respectively
as a forgetting of recognition (Honneth 2005) and a relation of relationallessness
(Jaeggi 2005).59 These two diagnostic concepts are frequently conceived according to
essentialized concepts of identity and the subject, disputed by Honneth and Jaeggi,
and as anthropocentric, which they fail to adequately overcome. The recognition of
the generative and transformative plurality of things offers a more suggestive non-
anthropocentric model as any autopoietic nexus, such as an ecosystem, can undergo
reification with destructive consequences and, to return to the Dialectic of Enlightenment
of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, be experienced as the alienation of the
domination of nature. No underlying collective or individual identity or subject is
required, as these reproduce the very reification under question. Ziranist ways of
dwelling, or being-in-the-world to recall Okakura’s expression, do not conceptually
negate but rather consist in shifting through these limiting conditions and standpoints
in which the freedom of dao is discovered in situations and things themselves. Ziran
does not exclusively apply to one’s own self and its freedom, except in hedonistic and
egotistical interpretations of the Warring States era philosopher Yang Zhu 楊朱. It
is disclosed in the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi in genuinely encountering things in
their own freedom. In the Daoist setting, there is a thingly autonomy that requires
appropriate attunement and recognition, contesting reification and alienation. The
dereification of thing and place is a condition of the dereification of human existence.
The self-determination of the thing appears in the Zhuangzi in their self-
transforming (zihua) and self-acting (ziwei). The adaptive and receptive disposition of
wuwei is correlated with the thing’s self-transformation by itself in chapter 11 (Zaiyou
在宥) and chapter 17 (Qiushui 秋水). The recognition of the self-acting of the thing
occurs when one does not self-act in the thirteenth “Heaven’s Way” (Tiandao 天道)
Zhuangzi chapter. Things occur and act of their own by “not self-acting” such that
“heaven does not bring the myriad things forth and they transform, earth does not
grow the myriad things and they are nurtured, the lords and kings do nothing and all
under heaven is achieved.”60
 Way, Thing, and World in Laozi 33

The Zhuangzi contested subordinating the thing’s way of being itself in its
environment, such as chaos freely existing without openings or the turtle enjoying
the muddy riverside, to an external role, e.g., having holes drilled or being displayed
at court, by emphasizing its own self-becoming that would be construed as an allotted
and singularly determined self-nature (zixing 自性). However, in addition to issues
of external adaptation and conformity, there are questions concerning internal
conformity and whether Zhuangzian freedom transcends only the former (for the sake
of internal authenticity or genuineness) or both external and internal determination.

9. Freedom with Things: Zhuangzian and Buddhist Reflections

The Wei-Jin era mysterious learning discourses of Wang Bi and Guo Xiang center
around nothingness and the thing. They are pivotal in modifying and transmitting
the ziranist Daodejing and Zhuangzi. Wang Bi’s ziran-oriented interpretation of
nothingness is examined later in Part Two. Guo Xiang stressed the singularity
of the thing. In his commentary on the Zhuangzi, he linked “lone” (du 獨) with
“transformation” (hua). In “lone-transformation” (duhua 獨化), the sole singular (du)
and self (zi) retain identity while transforming: the self retains itself and its own self-
nature in becoming other than itself in transformation.61 In Guo Xiang, the relation of
the thing to itself (as a guest of itself), individuated and potentially isolated as uniquely
lone and sole (shenqi duhua 神器獨化), is possible in interthingly mutual dependence
(xiangyin 相因). Such a vision of interdependence and independence, of harmony and
monadic self-determination to describe this relation in the categories of Leibniz, risks
for his critics bifurcating the thing between other-determined and self-determining,
identity and difference, and host and guest. The sole spontaneously self-generating
thing (zisheng 自生) is in jeopardy of monadic separation from the dynamic relational
responsive resonance of the myriad things in which its own self-determination as
world determination occurs.62
Zhi Dun 支遁 (Zhi Dao Lin 支道林, 314–366 ce), Dao’an 道安 (312–385 ce), and
fourth-century Chinese Buddhist sources informed by Lao-Zhuang and mysterious
learning teachings offer salient reference points for reconstructing philosophical
controversies involving Lao-Zhuang argumentative and hermeneutical strategies.
The Buddhist philosopher and monastic Zhi Dun fused the discourses of mysterious
learning and Buddhist “perfection of wisdom” (Prajñāpāramitā) literature prior
to the systematic formation of Chinese Madhyamaka from Kumārajīva 鳩摩羅什
and Sengzhao 僧肇 to the Tang era three treatises school (sanlun 三論) associated
with Jizang 吉藏. To jump ahead for a moment, Chinese Madhyamaka reappears in
Part Two in the context of distinguishing Daoist nothingness, Buddhist emptiness,
Heidegger’s nothing, and nothingness in Nishida Kitarō 西田幾多郎 (1870–1945) and
examining Heidegger’s lifelong interactions with Japanese intellectuals that led to a
1919 gift, a 1924 declined invitation conveyed by Miki Kiyoshi 三木清 (1897–1945) to
teach in Japan, and myriad conversations.
Zhi Dun’s thought might be described as a “Daoistic Buddhism,” a category invented
by modern scholars, in which early Lao-Zhuang Daoism is fulfilled in Buddhism
and Buddhism is deployed to resolve Daoist and mysterious learning philosophical
34 Heidegger and Dao

questions. Zhi Dun criticized Guo Xiang’s interpretation of Zhuangzi in his lost
“Discourse of Free and Easy Wandering” (xiaoyao lun 逍遙論) for the complacency,
determinism, and fatalism of its notion of complying (yue 約) with one’s endowed
particular allotment (fen 分) in the myriad transformations (wanhua 萬化). Fated
self-nature stands in tension with the freedom expressed in the joy of the fish playing
without a fixed determinate purpose, a narrative that—as noted earlier—fascinated
Heidegger and that he interpreted in relation to being-with in 1930.63 If taken as the
fixity of a predetermined character, it subverts the independence of free and easy
meandering that, it might be added, continues to resonate with the freedom of forms
of shamanistic and poetic “far-roaming” (yuanyou 遠遊) that meld spontaneity and
responsiveness and interior and exterior landscapes.64
Is freedom the freedom of enacting one’s fated self-nature and inborn character,
whatever it might be, or a freedom of transforming—in Buddhist discursive terms—the
seeds of self-nature that is ultimately empty of itself? Zhi Dun identified Zhuangzian
freedom with Buddhist prajñā. The latter perceives things as things without being
fettered by things in recognizing the self-emptiness of both somethingness and
nothingness.65 Zhi Dun’s conceptual blending contrasts with subsequent Buddhist
scholars, such as Guifeng Zongmi 圭峰宗密 (780–841 ce) in his Inquiry into the Origin
of Humanity (Yuanren lun 原人論) from the late 820s or early 830s. He criticized
the teachings of Laozi and Zhuangzi as fatalistic and unable to motivate disciplined
spiritual transformation and liberation (Zongmi 708b4; Gregory 1995: 44). If Zhi
Dun’s criticisms of Guo Xiang’s determinism are valid, then ziran, which promised in
the Zhuangzi to equalize and liberate things in their anarchic self-determination from
serving as mere sacrificial and instrumental objects, has become the self-determination
of the thing’s predetermined self-nature (zixing) in its allotted fated share. The next
chapter will examine a parallel problem of the absorption of worldly freedom into
destiny (Geschick) in Heidegger’s thinking of the 1930s.
To remain with the Chinese situation at this time, the problematic of determinism
and freedom that emerged between Guo and Zhi presents numerous interpretive
difficulties. First, the Zhuangzi itself articulates in the Inner Chapter “Great Teacher”
the significance of the self-occurring of dao rather than fixed nature in discussions of
the thing. Dao is without forced activity and fixed form (wuwei wuxing 無為無形) and
self-originating and self-rooting (ziben zigen 自本自根). The life of things transforms
without its direction being known and the exemplary sages participate and wander
amidst transforming things without escape or separation (聖人將遊於物之所不得
遯而皆存) and without calculation and anxiety regarding their purpose and outcome.
Second, the Zhuangzi does not only indicate the sole singular monadic self-determining
transformation of the thing but also mutual co-determination (sympoiesis) in the
synchronization and integration of the myriad things that Guo Xiang treats, as it were,
like a preestablished harmony that leaves each thing to solely determine itself.66 That
is, ziran refers to the self-happening of the thing as well as to its natureless and selfless
(in any fixed or substantialized sense) world-happening as a singular moment that
dynamically mirrors and reflects the whole.
 Way, Thing, and World in Laozi 35

10. Self-Relationality
The equalizing (qi 齊) of the Zhuangzi is described in the “Autumn Floods” chapter
as the “coherence and equality of the myriad things” (wanwu yiqi 萬物一齊). This
equalizing is more a transforming flowing musical harmonizing than subordination to a
fixed determinate uniformity.67 Equalization transpires in temporal and transformative
relationality and its recognition, in which “heaven, earth, and I live side by side
together, and the myriad things and I are one” (天地與我並生, 而萬物與我為一), in
relational world-naturing as well as in singular and sole self-naturing.
Kierkegaard’s Anti-Climacus claimed that the self is a relation between a relation
and a relation. The relationality of reality is even more radically expressed in Laozi
and Zhuangzi. Daoist expressions with “zi-” convey a profoundly different model of
reflexive self-relation than the self-reflection of a thinking subject that is only one of its
forms. This early variety of zi-expressions in early sources such as the Guodian Laozi
and the Heng Xian is flattened out into a notion of ziran that increasingly becomes
fixated as an objective order and object, in which the thing appears determined by
a fixed nature. This development weakens the dynamic verbal and transformative
character of early ziran discourses conveyed in the Laozi and the Zhuangzi: the thing
as irreducibly self-so of itself or self-naturing in its own transformations and flow.
In conclusion, to briefly reiterate, ziran signifies the self- and, if not monadically
isolated, the world-naturing of the thing. It is the relational thing in its temporal and
transformative self-naturing that distinguishes the thing in the Daodejing and the
Zhuangzi and indicates an aesthetics and culture of care for things in their own self-so
thereness. This need not presuppose either their sentience or internal sense of well-
being. Chapter 1 has traced the senses and philosophical implications of early Chinese
conceptions of the thing. The following four chapters examine the transformative
relational thing in Daoism, Heidegger, and his generational context.
36
 2

The Autopoietic Self-Transformation of

Things in Ziranist Daoism and Heidegger

I. Phúsis and the Thing

1. Nature, Phúsis, and Ziran

The letting releasement and responsive attunement of the thing in wuwei in early
materials related to the formation of the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi presuppose a
cosmological natural-political order of the self-generativity of things and a seasonal
temporality in which they operate. What can they signify apropos Heidegger’s ontology
or to a contemporary audience who can read both? In Heidegger’s corpus, the modern
construction and technological enframing of world, as an arena of universally fungible
and exchangeable things, are intimately interwoven with the history of Occidental
metaphysics and its early Greek origins, seemingly excluding premodern Asia.1
“Nature” and the “natural thing” are primarily interpreted from “world” in Being
and Time and are derivative concepts abstracted from Dasein’s world-relations and
way of being-in-the-world (GA 2: 60, 63). The “homogenous space of nature” is a
“deworlded” space (GA 2: 112). A pure natural thing (Naturding) without Dasein’s
world is incomprehensible (GA 82: 52). Being and Time already introduces a “prior
release” (vorgängige Freigabe) of letting the thing rest (Bewendenlassen) and a third
more elemental “power of nature” (GA 2: 84–5 and 70, 211), even while accentuating
the instrumental referential context instead of his later thingly oriented relational
context. These undeveloped alternative hints prepare the way for his more radical
thinking of nature as power in relation to phúsis in the mid-1930s, the releasement of
nature from the confines of power in the 1940s, and then his critique of an enframed
world that obstructs life by obscuring the sense of things. First, the “there” belongs to
Dasein. Later, the “there” is the gathering of the thing.
The experiential and discursive functions of ziran entail a distinctive yet intersecting
form of world-event and disclosure from Heidegger’s retrieval of the early Greek
experience and conception of phúsis (φύσις) as more elemental than any experience or
concept of “nature.” Natura is a derivative and problematic concept that he used with
reluctance. Heidegger repeatedly reimagines nature as phúsis in works such as the 1935
lecture-course Introduction to Metaphysics, revised and published as a book in 1953, as
determinate of the history of Occidental metaphysics:
38 Heidegger and Dao

what does the word phúsis say? It says what emerges from itself (for example,
the emergence, the blossoming, of a rose), the unfolding that opens itself up, the
coming-into-appearance in such unfolding, and holding itself and persisting in
appearance—in short, the emerging-abiding sway.
(GA 40: 16)

The early Greek phúō (φῠω) is related to archaic Indo-European words for birth,
earth, dwelling, and being. It designates that which is brought forth, generated, and
produced. The meaning of phúsis is that which arises and disperses (akin to ziran to
this extent). Phúsis was only later distinguished from what is artfully produced (tékhnē,
τέχνη) and from the normatively lawful (nómos, νόμος) as phúsis came to refer only to
that which materially exists. This expression encompasses in its early Greek context
not only the natural, the material, and the physical (in the subsequently reduced
senses of these words) but heaven, earth, stones, plants, humans, gods, and their works
(GA 40: 17).
Phúsis further signifies in Heidegger’s provocative reading that which is as an
emerging upsurge from being’s hiddenness and concealment, an abiding holding
sway (Walten, which typically means reign, preside, prevail), and essence (Wesen) as
essencing (Wesung) rather than as the determinate underlying idea or principle of the
thing.2 While the metaphysical concept of “essence” intones that there is something
else determining the thing, self-essencing indicates that it is in fact its own way of
existing. Such qualities of self-becoming are expressed in Daoist sources where things
emerge and transform according to their own nature, place, and time. Even the dao
of things cannot be fixed into or imposed as a determinate principle. Once more, we
find correlations between Heidegger and the Daodejing. Dao is called concealed and
nameless (daoyin wuming 道隱無名) in Daodejing 41. It holds sway without coercion
or violence (buzai 不宰) in Daodejing 10 and 51. Reinhold von Plaenckner, Wilhelm,
Georg Misch, and other German interpreters deployed the expressions “reign,”
“prevailing,” or “holding sway” (Walten) to speak of dao.3 It is a crucial feature of Greek
phúsis in Heidegger that becomes intertwined with questions of power and violent
creation in the mid-1930s. This differs from the pluralistic self-ordering of ziran where
power and violence are signs of loss and failure. Yet, as Heidegger clarified in a later
note, in which these two terms share greater affinity, phúsis is in the first place “the self-
unfolding emergence in and through which a being first is what it is” (GA 73. 1: 85).

2. Phúsis and Its Unconcealment and Saying

The word phúsis operates as a name for being itself, as that by which beings appear
(GA 40: 17), referring to being’s emerging event, emerging beings and things, and
their unconcealed truth. The emerged and the submerged, the unconcealed and the
concealed are interconnected, and truth (alḗtheia, ἀλήθεια) is thought negatively in
Heidegger’s etymological reconstruction as “not hidden” (a-lḗtheia). Lḗthē means
concealment, forgetfulness, and oblivion. It is the name of a goddess and a river in
Hades. It refers for Heidegger to a primary nonderivative refusal, obstruction, and
unsaid, while truth (or alḗtheia, which is more originary than and only inadequately
 The Autopoietic Self-Transformation of Things 39

called truth) refers to that which emerges into the openness from hiddenness and into
saying from the unsaid.
According to Heraclitus’s fragment 123, “nature tends toward hiddenness” (φύσις
κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ). Heidegger translated this as “emerging gives favor to self-concealing”
(GA 55: 110, 121). It might be thought that phúsis names the self-emergence (von ihm
selbst her) of beings from being, such that ontic beings can be questioned from the
ontological perspective of being and intersects with ziran as the self-emergence of
things from dao, as it shifts through things without being limited by them. The dao
nourishes and has its freedom in things, following its own self-nature and generating
exemplary models to be emulated by sages and non-sages without being confined to
one fixed rule, in Daodejing 25 (Lou 1980: 65).
Several questions should be addressed now. Heidegger mentions lógos (λόγος)
and not phúsis, in conjunction with dao. A basic guiding word (Leitwort) such as
dao operates as an originary world orienting word, as Heidegger noted (GA 11: 45;
GA 12: 187). It is striking that Heidegger reflectively and adaptively engages with
Daoist language and does not follow the widespread practice of drawing comparisons
between facets of Daoist and Occidental philosophy, beyond the statements that dao,
lógos, and Ereignis (the non-ontic appropriative event of being) operate in their own
ways as elemental untranslatable guiding words (GA 11: 45; GA 12: 187).
Heidegger’s “From a Dialogue on Language,” a key text explored in part two,
expresses hesitancy and warns of all-too-easy identifications that give an appearance
of mutual understanding without a genuine encounter occurring between two
interlocutors. As basic guiding words, each discloses a distinctive world. The relation
between Heidegger’s being and dao is much more complicated, as phúsis signifies being
as emergence and self-naturing the way dao arises of itself and generates all things
from nothingness. It is from the self-generative watery yet fecund depth of nothingness
that things emerge in early Laozi-related sources excavated in the archaeological sites
Guodian and Mawangdui. If dao functions akin to lógos (language as saying), then in
early Daoistic contexts it is nothingness (the guiding word of part two) that evokes and
structurally parallels the generative functions of phúsis.

3. The Hermeneutics and Politics of Phúsis and the Thing

Intercultural philosophy, which contests the fixated identities of orthodox philosophy,
needs to recognize both proximity and distance, resisting both totalizing fusion and
isolated particularity. It should not only co-illumine diverse perspectives and discursive
configurations. It can also self-reflectively and critically engage, confront, and
dialogically differentiate in communication (Auseinanderzetzung). Heidegger began to
address this hermeneutical problem in his 1937 “Ways to [Dialogical] Discussion.”4 In
this short essay, he considers the barriers to a genuine understanding between peoples
and reformulates, at the collective level of the French and German peoples, the earlier
themes of making room for and leaping-ahead for the other in mutual individuation,
actions that require both a lasting will to listen to each other and a reserved courage
for one’s own self-determination (GA 13: 21). Self-determination plays a multivalent
role since it is ideologically entangled with both freedom and oppression. Autonomous
40 Heidegger and Dao

self-determination has had an emancipatory import in relation to oppression. Such

concepts can also contest pathological, oppressive forms when the other is not heard
and eclipsed in ideologically driven formations of the individual and popular will, as
Arendt exposes in her 1951 The Origins of Totalitarianism.5
In Heidegger’s 1937 essay, he appears caught between the self-determining willing
of the German people (das deutsche Volk), which dominated his thinking during
the 1930s, and Gelassenheit toward others, as self-determination is problematically
connected with decisions about creatively determining the destiny and mission of the
Occident (no doubt in distinction from the Soviet East) (GA 13: 16). The prospect of
genuinely making room for and hearing toward the other in mutual co-illumination
and co-individuation is thereby distorted and undermined. It is only adjusted in
Heidegger’s shift in 1943 from the paradigm of the self-assertion and self-determination
of the will, which lacks an appropriate sense of measure and limit, to the freedom of
letting releasement that recognizes its limits vis-à-vis others.
Can Lao-Zhuang ziranist political models of sympoietically self-ordering
communities and environments be deployed to not only co-illuminate but also
transcend Heidegger’s political thinking and philosophy of nature and art? The anarchic
self-measuring social-political tendencies of specific threads of Daoist discourses are
best approximated in democratic self-organization of social-political life through the
interactions of a plurality of individuals (better articulated by Arendt than Heidegger).
These points suggest (to think with and beyond Heidegger and his agrarianism and
linguistically defined “people”) an alternative ziran-oriented philosophy of nature
and society to his conception, during the National Socialist era, of violent creative
founders and the collective identity of the people.6 Noncoercive action (wuwei) and
nonintervention in affairs (wushi) were formulated in the Warring States environment
of debates over coercive politics, in which (to summarize) “legalists” advocated
law, punishment, the force of the state, and the ultimate power of the sage-king;
Confucians endorsed the exemplary role of virtue in the moral ordering of society;
and the ziran-oriented Daoists conceived of the self-generative autopoiesis of social-
political life in which people ordered themselves with or—in more radical anarchic
moments in the Zhuangzi, the Liezi, and the admonishment of Bao Jingyan by Ge
Hong 葛洪 (283–343 or 363 ce)—without sage-kings. Heidegger is at this juncture
closer in proximity to the legalist assertion of power than anarchic (or dao-archic) self-
generation and nearer to the coercion of things in a new formation of life than their
releasement into their own self-openness.
Early Greek phúsis is depicted in Heidegger’s reconstruction as the “first beginning”
(GA 69: 142), from which Occidental metaphysics emerges. There is also the “other
beginning” that confronts this first beginning. In the postwar period, various readers
discovered the “other beginning” in early Chinese and other forms of thought. In the
period of its initial articulation, the other beginning concerns the early Greeks and
contemporary Germans (Bambach 2003). It is described in the 1935 Contributions to
Philosophy as the referral and offering/sacrifice of beings to being that—in Heidegger’s
language—essences and holds sway as an event in the clearing of self-hiddenness.7
Modern European thought has been shaped in its interactions with its others
that it typically endeavors to exclude from its own sense of history and otherless
 The Autopoietic Self-Transformation of Things 41

self-identity. The Indian and Islamic sources of science and mathematics (such as
infinity and zero as discussed later) should be too obvious to deny. There are also
intriguing intersections between the politics of nature and Chinese philosophy in
earlier forms of European thought. First, for instance, French physiocrats such as the
Sinophile François Quesnay, the “Confucius of Europe” to his admirers, had called for
“physiocracy” as government by phúsis that blended minimizing the mercantilist state,
the promotion of agriculture and agrarian communities, and economic” laisser passer,
laisser faire” and free trade, inspired in part by (a French Enlightenment appropriation
of) Confucianism and wuwei. Second, the agrarian-agricultural facets of the Daodejing
and the Zhuangzi were construed as supporting an anarchistic communal socialism in
fin-de-siècle intellectuals such as Julius Hart and Buber. If the previously discussed
accounts of Heidegger’s 1919 encounter with Daoism are accurate, it is conceivable
that Heidegger linked Daoist motifs with leaping-ahead and making room and space
for the other and, as he describes in 1937, for the thing in its openness (GA 45: 3, 29).
As in Quesnay, Buber, or Ernst Bloch, who wrote an essay (published in 1962, but
which he dates to 1926) on Johann Peter Hebel, Jeremias Gotthelf, and the agrarian
utopianism of rustic dao (“bäurisches Tao”), Heidegger would no doubt have noticed
the agrarian-environmental elements of Chinese philosophical and poetic discourses,
if not their anarchistic and libertarian Marxist self-generative spontaneity respectively
accentuated by Buber and Bloch.8
Agrarian utopian images of fields, forests, and rivers dominate many of
Heidegger’s writings. But, conspicuously, such considerations are not the focus of
Heidegger’s vision of German Dasein’s decision in 1933 or of great leaders poetically
creating and forming a people in their own self-determination from the phúsis
of being in the mid-1930s. Heidegger advocated his own distinctive version of the
politics of phúsis, a “physiocracy” interpreted in his own ontological sense, during
his initial engagement on behalf of the new totalitarian regime in which alienating
dispersion, separation, and division become the originary negativity confronting the
people’s Dasein (GA 91: 184–5). Phúsis and the emergence of the National Socialist
state as its expression are enmeshed in his early Nazi-era notes on metapolitics and
advancing effort (GA 91: 172–87) and in the 1934–35 lecture-course Hölderlin’s Hymns
“Germania” and “The Rhine” (GA 39).
Jacques Derrida, among others, explicated in The Beast and the Sovereign the
imposition of violence, power, and “sovereign potency” in Heidegger’s conception of
phúsis as holding sway (Walten) in a way that can underwrite political commitments
through the philosophy of nature.9 In the mid-1930s the establishment of beings is
conceived through “work and deed and sacrifice” (“Werk und Tat und Opfer”) (GA 65:
298). It is interconnected with the creativity and violence of nature that is activated in
order to attain the authentic self-determination and we-being of the collective Dasein
of the German people. The sources, dynamics, and consequences of this problematic
“metapolitical” and onto-political deformation of the ancient Greek notion of the
independent pólis and the modern republican notion of the popular self-determination
of a unitary general will, with its faith in a collective national will directly choosing
itself, unconcerned with individual rights and participatory public spheres, calls for its
own specific ideology-critical analysis.
42 Heidegger and Dao

Heidegger is at this moment near and far away from the wuwei-ziran insights
of the 1920s or the semi-Daoist turn of the mid-1940s. During this politically and
philosophically problematic period, Heidegger asserts the self-ordering of the people
and its imagined communal identity in contrast to individual Dasein, pluralistic
society, or mortals and things in their gathering and resonance. His thought appears
motivated by active and coercive acting (wei 為) and aggressively intervening in
entangled affairs (shi 事), as he claims that authentic transformation requires (in place
of the “anticipatory liberating solicitude” of Being and Time) a “liberating violence,”
leadership, and enduring formation.10 His thinking is at its farthest removed from the
openness and responsive releasement of things in their own self-becoming. The latter
turn is provoked (at least in part) by his subsequent engagement with the Daodejing
and its dao that encompasses and nourishes things without violating them in their
plural self-generative and mutual autopoiesis.11
An important clarification is necessary here: autopoiesis will be interpreted here
through Daoism rather than imposed on it. Daoist autopoiesis only occurs through
singulars (things) in their interaction (dao) through emptiness. It is inherently
communicative, mutual, or sympoietic. Collective organicism (as in romantic and
vitalist natural philosophy) and closed systems (as in the systems theory of Niklas
Luhmann) signify a reification, since the autopoiesis of a collective nature or society,
without alterity and singularity, is governed by a fatalistic totalizing arché rather
than an anarchically open and interactive self-ordering. Ziranist autopoiesis signifies
sympoiesis as it releases rather than imprisons the myriad things.
The thing shifts from its heretofore passive and static pragmatic characterization,
as an object for human eyes and hands, into a novel role in creative making (poēsis,
ποίησις) and the work during the early and mid-1930s. It is no longer only available as
a useful product or theoretically represented object as it now discloses world through
the work of art—albeit not yet potentially of and by itself in addressing and saying as
it does in 1949–50. The thing in Heidegger’s 1935 works is not exclusively determined
by usefulness and questionable in its breakdown. However, it is not yet autopoietic as it
is still defined by the work of being through sagely poets, philosophers, and lawgivers.
This resonates with Hanfei’s “legalist” way of legitimating the sovereign more than
the antipolitical and “anarchistic” politics of the Zhuangzi and Liezi which refuses the
sovereign and disentangles fixating perspectives.
Heidegger in his better moments (that prioritize existent beings) recognizes
the being of the thing as its existential autopoiesis such that the ontic operates in
relation to the ontological without being reduced to it. In other moments, the thing
is impoverished in relation to human existence, as in Being and Time, or subsumed
in being, as in the 1930s. The thing emerges in the latter context from being, and is
potentially sacrificed to it, or a given historical configuration of the event of being, in
what, in the politically highly problematic context of National Socialist totalitarianism,
Heidegger portrays as the creativity of originary “poets, thinkers and state creators,
who actually ground and establish the historical existence of a nation.”12
What then is the relation between phúsis (as upsurging and emerging holding
sway) and the particular thing? Already in the 1930s, Heidegger calls for liberating
the thing from being a particular carrier of properties and from the paradigm of
 The Autopoietic Self-Transformation of Things 43

representational thinking and truth as correctness and correspondence. The thing is

at work in emergence, art, and sacrifice and no longer merely sunk in impoverished
worldlessness, as in 1929. Yet is the thing ever genuinely liberated from its pragmatically
mediated and anthropocentrically determined nexus of significance? Does Heidegger
ever arrive at an appropriate interpretation of the thing as it is happening of itself (in its
ziran) and in its own world openness? Can we appropriately conceive the self-naturing
and worlding of the thing through Heidegger’s reflections?

4. The Thing, the Work, and the Poetic

There are already indications pointing toward the prioritization of the thing in his later
thought. Phúsis is called the first beginning and da-sein, as the “openness of the there,”
the other beginning, in his notes for the 1935 Frankfurt lectures version of “The Origin
of the Work of Art” that was eventually reworked for publication in 1949 (GA 82: 494).
In this work, earth is the emerging, the upsurge, and the showing forth of that which
is hidden. The clearing is an “open middle” or center that is not enclosed or encircled
by beings, as it “circles around all beings like the nothingness that we hardly know”
(GA 5: 40).
The thing can only be encountered amidst the clearing (Lichtung). This does
not primarily signify light but rather thinning out, as in an open area in a forest in
which light can then shine forth. Heidegger gives two apparently different (at least
in emphasis) yet perhaps complementary interpretations of the relationship between
clearing and the thing. One strategy prioritizes the clearing as an event of being over
things that arise and disappear within it: “In the midst of beings as a whole an open
place occurs. There is a clearing. Thought of in reference to beings, this clearing is more
in being than are beings” (GA 5: 39–40; Heidegger 2002: 30). The thing is in danger
of being concealed and lost in being, as the ontological difference moves toward
overweighing being against existent beings, whether taken sacrificially (e.g., for the sake
of transforming earth and things into a people’s homeland) or generationally—through
natality and mortality—as a “taking turns” with earth, things, and others.13 A being in
its own generation and death should be honored and celebrated rather than transmuted
into a sacrifice for the sake of legitimating idols of gods and peoples.
Another hermeneutical strategy diverges more powerfully from the degradation of
the thing for the sake of the idea and the soul in Occidental metaphysics. This strategy
prioritizes the thing as it shapes moment and place. It centers opening and clearing in
the unique relational worlding and gathering of the thing: “the thing things world.”
We think the thing in its own terms when we let the thing be in its thinging out of the
worlding of world (GA 7: 173). In the latter text, Heidegger evokes an almost Daoist
sensibility of ziran, as it is no longer the thing in the artwork (e.g., the shaped and
positioned stone in the poiesis of the sculpture) but the thing as thing (e.g., the uncut
unpositioned stone itself in its autopoiesis) that forms meaningful worlds. Each stone
can disclose from its own moment and place an interrelated environmental nexus.
How did Heidegger’s modified thinking of the thing take place? Revealingly, in the
“Origin of the Work of Art,” the thing in its thingliness, as carrying and opening “the
there” (GA 82: 494), plays an increasingly noteworthy role from the lecture’s initial
44 Heidegger and Dao

1935 version until its eventual 1949 publication. Heidegger contends, with Kant and
Dilthey in the background, against aesthetics and the precedence of subjectivity,
genius, and the artist. He emphasizes instead the role of elemental thingliness, earth,
and world in the priority of the work that discloses them. The thing is situated between
thingliness, equipmentality, and work articulated in relation to emergence and holding
sway (phúsis), craft, technique, and eventually technology (tékhnē), and creation and
creative action (poēsis) in 1935.
What about the thing in the work? Thinking confronts the greatest resistance
to determining the thingness of the thing as the inconspicuous thing intractably
withdraws from it (GA 5: 16–17). The artwork has a thingly basis and functions
as a pragmatically and symbolically mediated thing.14 The thing is not intuited or
given in itself. It is mediated in the work through equipmentality. In articulating
the “thingly character” of the work of art, Heidegger interrogated three prevailing
expositions concerning the thing: (1) as bearer of characteristics or properties (a
subject with predicates), (2) as the unity of a manifold of sense perceptions (as
aesthesis), and (3) as formed matter. The first two definitions express modern
theoretical models of objectified objectness (Gegenständlichkeit). The third,
Aristotelian, conception of the thing as formed matter was formulated according
to the model of creation and making through equipment, such that the thing is
experienced as objectively present-at-hand (1 and 2) and as pragmatically ready-
to-hand (3). The equipmental tool-being of the thing is determined by its qualities
of availability, reliability, and usability.
The materiality and equipmentality of the thing are appropriated in the artwork
such that the thingly work can bring, set forth and become world-disclosing and world-
building. Van Gogh’s boots, which Heidegger likely misinterpreted, “disclose the world
of the peasant as related to the earth”; the ancient Greek “temple arises from the earth
toward the sky disclosing a world.” The painting and the temple as truth-in-the-work
are specific manifestations of being’s emergence and unconcealing’s disclosure.
Things are derivative to work and truth, which are interlinked in a sacrificial
economy of the truth of being and its enactment in creative and violent works:

One essential way in which truth establishes itself in the beings it has opened
up is its setting-itself-into-the-work. Another way in which truth comes to
presence is through the act which founds a state. Again, another way in which
truth comes to shine is the proximity of that which is not simply a being but
rather the being which is most in being. Yet another way in which truth grounds
itself is the essential sacrifice. A still further way in which truth comes to be is
in the thinker’s questioning, which, as the thinking of being, names being in its
question-worthiness.
(GA 5: 49; Heidegger 2002: 37)

In this context, tékhnē is not merely technology or technique; it is a practical way of

knowing things. Poēsis is a making, forming, and creating things that can violently
enact—and gains its power from—the emergence, upsurge, and sovereign holding
sway of phúsis.
 The Autopoietic Self-Transformation of Things 45

Heidegger’s thinking in this essay continues to be inadequate to the ziranist truth of

the thing. This thing in the work is not the self-generative thing that offers a measure,
and this poetic creation is not the intimate word responsively bound to the happening
of the thing. The thing of the “Origin of the Work of Art” is closer to the dominion
of the instrumental and representational object of Being and Time than it is to the
formation of the free region of released things in the Bremen Lectures and related
notebooks (GA 99). In between these two points are his critical self-reflections on this
earlier account of earth, thing, and the work (GA 82: 494) and the 1943 engagement
with Daoism (GA 75: 43–4).

II. Heidegger’s Later Thinking of the Thing

in Relation to Daoism
5. The Historical and Philosophical Emergence of the Fourfold
In the 1949 Bremen Lectures, in many ways his most Daoist-inspired work, Heidegger
describes the gathering of the fourfold (das Geviert) taking place between earth and sky,
mortals and immortals. The established definition of “Geviert” is quadripartite or four-
quartered, evoking the boundless four-cornered dao without corners (dafang wuyu
大方無隅) of Daodejing 41 (Lou 1980: 112). Wang Bi’s commentaries on Daodejing 41
and 58 state that this fourfold encompasses and enfolds all things without cutting and
wounding any of them (不以方割物).
This usage was not unfamiliar to Heidegger’s linguistic community. Two Weimar-
era German translations already name this as the fourfold. Wilhelm’s translation reads:
“the great fourfold has no corners” (“Das große Geviert hat keine Ecken”) (Wilhelm
1911: 46, 103). Federmann’s translation has “a great fourfold without limiting angles”
(“ein groß Geviert, ohn Winkel endend”) (Federmann 1920: 47). A Daoist-informed
fourfold was articulated in Heidegger’s contemporary linguistic community in works
that were in part familiar to him. It is not used by Hölderlin and rarely by other poets.
Heidegger’s conception of the fourfold evokes Chinese discourses of the four-
cornered world and the world as consisting of heaven and earth (tiandi 天地), humans
and spirits (renshen 人神).15 The more typical classical Chinese expression is “heaven,
earth, and humans.” There are other sources from which Heidegger could have drawn.
Daodejing 25 adds, as Wilhelm discusses in his commentary, dao as a fourth (Wilhelm
1911: 99). The chapter speaks of the greatness of dao, heaven, earth, and the sage-
king in a fourfold relationship in which humans model themselves on earth, earth
on heaven, heaven on dao, and dao models itself on its own self-naturing. Wilhelm’s
comments on the preceding chapter identify “creatures” (Wilhelm’s translation of
the Chinese word for things) with gods and humans (“die ‘Geschöpfe’ = Götter und
Menschen”) and the “with-world” (Mitwelt) (Wilhelm 1911: 99).
What is an exemplary model in Daodejing 25 (Lou 1980: 65)? Fa 法 can signify law,
rule, method, exemplary model, and later the Buddhist dharma. In “legalism,” it means
method or tactical sensibility in ruling and invisibly deploying power. “Legalism” is thus
a misnomer. In the Daodejing, it is emulating and patterning oneself on the way and
46 Heidegger and Dao

the sages. In the German linguistic context that informed Heidegger’s understanding,
Victor von Strauss translated fa as correct measure (Richtmass). Wilhelm’s 1911
translation uses Vorbild which can be understood as an exemplary model but also as
a primordial archetypal image for all things, including humans and gods.16 Whereas
Strauss’s translation uses square (Quadrat) instead of fourfold and typically spirits
(Geister) in preference to gods, Wilhelm’s language is closer to Heidegger’s way of
speaking of the fourfold.
Other variations on varieties of earthly and spiritual entities appear in German
accounts of Chinese sources. A post-Han-era religious Daoist expression is “humans,
spirits, and immortals/transcendents” (ren shen xian 人神仙). Such immortals are
not Heidegger’s gods. They are biospiritually realized humans rather than natural
spirits. In the German context, the influential nineteenth-century Austrian Sinologist
and Japanologist August Pfizmaier describes in his 1870 book The Tao-Teaching
of Genuine Persons and Immortals how religious Daoist teachings encompass
heaven and earth (“Himmel und Erde”), genuine humans and immortals (“wahren
Menschen und den Unsterblichen”), and humans and gods (“Menschen und Götter”)
(Pfizmaier 1870: 229). A different variation of the cosmic whole is seen in Ernst
Faber’s 1877 work on the Daoism of the Liezi, construed as pantheistic naturalism. He
notes how humans complete or perfect themselves situated between heaven, earth, and
things (Faber 1877: 6).
The exemplary image—interpreted along the lines of a Daoist Vorbild rather than a
Jungian Urbild—of the fourfold is shaped in part by Heidegger’s intensive engagement
with the Laozi, Zhuangzi, and conceivably other Chinese and Japanese sources and
interlocutors in the 1940s. Pöggeler attributes this influence to “Chinese literature” in
Martin Heidegger’s Path of Thinking and elsewhere to the Daodejing, maintaining that
it plays an understated yet undeniable and striking role in Heidegger’s thinking.17 In
the confluence of the fourfold, it is not being or human existence, but the thing that
gathers and discloses world.18 Things now partake in an elemental being of their own,
a dimension missing in the predominantly instrumental analysis of the thing in Being
and Time, or the creative poetic violence of Introduction to Metaphysics and the various
1935 lecture versions of “The Origin of the Work of Art.” Although threatened and
circumscribed by its ordering in metaphysical and technological enframing (Gestell),
the thing can come to word (zu Wort kommen) in the attuned saying that conveys the
thing in its own sense.

6. The World-Gathering Thing

How can the once worldless thing come to gather words around itself in saying? As
noted earlier, Heidegger introduced the phrase “it worlds” in his 1919 lecture-course
to indicate the verbal character of world as worlding. He proposed “the nothing
nothings” in his 1929 lecture “What is Metaphysics?”; only later did he arrive at the
theme of the first 1949 Bremen lecture, revised as the 1950 essay “The Thing.” In these
latter works, he notes how “the thing things” in statements such as “the thinging
gathers” (“das Dingen versammelt”) and—contrary to the 1929 static worldlessness
of the thing—“the thing things world” (“das Ding dingt Welt”) (GA 7: 175, 182;
 The Autopoietic Self-Transformation of Things 47

GA 79: 13, 24). The thing is not a correlate of intentional consciousness, the projection
of temporalizing human existence, or the emerging sway of being. It is the thing’s
lingering time spent and earthly dwelling place (i.e., both senses of ver-weilen) that
gathers and brings near earth and sky, mortals and immortals into the fourfold
(GA 7: 170; GA 79: 17).
The word “thing” in its modern usage can signify an indeterminate object,
somethingness, or in its plural form reality. The archaic meanings of the Germanic
word ding/thing (*þenga-) include a moment or duration in time and gathering as,
for instance, in the assembling of the populace or a court to authorize a judgment
and decision. It is this sense of the thing’s temporalizing and gathering that Heidegger
accentuates in “The Thing.” Heidegger’s reformed elucidation of the thing consequently
breaks with his earlier temporal idealism that identified ekstatic Dasein as the locus of
temporalizing.
In Heidegger’s shift against the lingering transcendental idealism of his analytic
of Dasein, and toward the thing in its own ways of being as more than an intentional
correlate, time and space are then not given as merely objectively present as a neutral
arena for that which phenomenally appears as bearing qualities, as in the paradigm
of representational thinking. In distinction from the temporalizing of human being-
in-the-world in the 1924 lecture The Concept of Time, in which the “in each case for a
while at a particular time” (Jeweiligkeit) constitutes the “I am” (GA 64: 113), Heidegger
articulates in 1949 the prominence of things in the duration of “a while” (Weile) and
the nearness and proximity of place wherein humans reside. The lingering of things
gathers time as an encountered duration and their dwelling gathers space as an
encountered locality (Gegend) with its own singular configuration and life. Temporality
and spatiality are not merely external frames in which things are placed; they consist of
the co-presencing and mutual interconnecting and mirroring of things as world. The
verbal sense of the thinging of the thing is the nearing in which “world as world” is
held near (GA 7: 179; GA 79: 24). The thing discloses world and, further than this, it
gathers, carries, and opens the worlding of the world in the specificity of a durational
“for a while” and the locality of a place.19 This localizing place is simultaneously self-
generatively world-forming and world-opening. It might be the place on the way
where the wanderer tarries under the canopy of the useless tree, encountering anew
the earth below and the sky above.
What then is the relation of thing, earth, and world first thought of in terms of
strife and contest in the mid-1930s and now as nourishing generosity of the “there
is / it gives” (es gibt)? According to their archaic roots, as guiding hints for thinking,
earth means ground; the earth as the dwelling place of mortal things was named the
middle enclosure (Midgard) as distinct from the enclosure of the Æsir gods (Asgard).
World is the generational existence of the “age of man” (Welt as from old Germanic
weralt) or “world-age” (Weltalter). This etymology reveals a particular sense of place
and time. A world-age and its world-picture consist not only in a human generation;
it is a configuration of things. The thing, great because it does not live merely for itself,
generously opens and discloses world and world conceals the event of the thing as it
becomes an object (whether with or without value) in what Heidegger earlier described
as a practically determined referential nexus of significance.
48 Heidegger and Dao

7. Enframing and Releasing Things

Heidegger diagnosed in his December 1949 Bremen Lecture “Das Gestell” and in the
1954 essay “The Question Concerning Technology” how the collecting formation
(Gestalt) of modernity is an enframing positionality (Gestell) in which things and
humans are available as a standing-reserve (Bestand) of useful resources. Ge-stell
is a condition of world-denial and the neglect of things (GA 100: 23). It signifies a
totalizing collecting (ge-, which signifies gathering, in expressions such as Ge-viert, the
fourfold) and placing and positioning (stellen). It obscures and excludes other ways
in which things disclose themselves. It conceals—in an objectively fixated presence
(Präsenz as distinguished from self-presencing as an-wesen) and the apparent
givenness of availability—the occurrence of truth in the dynamic of mystery and
disclosure, concealment and unconcealment. Ge-stell functions through positioning
things as purely useful or useless. It operates as the enframing or enpicturing
structure, the totalizing framework, and technical apparatus in which things lose
their thingly character in being purely given, obtainable, and disposable in—to step
beyond Heidegger into critical social analysis—processes of production, exchange,
and consumption.20 Heidegger’s anti-totalizing analysis of enframing can serve as a
formal indicative and critical template for diagnosing and confronting the degradation
of things and their environing worlds.21
Heidegger’s analysis of enframing entails a significant shift in his thinking of the
thing. Heidegger was concerned foremost with the reification of human existence in
the 1920s, submerging the thing in instrumentality. He is concerned in 1949 with the
hardening fixation of thingly existence in which natural and human lives have become
objectified and instrumentalized, their presencing substantialized into available
givenness. These expressions involve two problems. First, according to Heidegger,
they hint at yet do not reach the hidden essencing of technology. This means that the
analysis of instrumentality and availability must lead to the question of presencing as
such. Heidegger’s elucidation of being in its coming to presence and withdrawal in
absence challenges being experienced as mere given presence. Secondly, given that
reification means to be reduced to a thing-like role, it could be asked whether the
thing can be reified. The thing can be reified if the thingness it is fixed and limited to
is different than its own manner of thingness. Heidegger marks the difference between
the thing as instrumentally and objectively present (as enframed in a fixed position
and use) and the thingliness of “it things” as world-gathering. The thing gathers world
and grants nearness in stillness; yet the thing as object-entity obscures and disfigures
the thing that it would represent (GA 98: 114–15, 119). Heidegger speaks in the 1949
Bremen Lectures of the danger of the enframing picturing of world in which things are
frozen in their positionality.22
The intimate bonds between thing, place, and world remain a key task for Heidegger,
as his notion of the thing shifts in relationship to instrumentality and usefulness. The
worldlessness of the thing is diagnosed as an absence and lack of the thing as thing in
Heidegger’s later thinking. The world-picture as enframing the thing positions, fixates,
and obfuscates the thing qua thing, leaving it and us in our encounter with it without
world. The ordering of enframing places itself above the thing that it encompasses
 The Autopoietic Self-Transformation of Things 49

and positions. Enframing positionality obscures the proximity of the world that
approaches in the thing (GA 11: 122). Things become mere facets of a reality consisting
of a standing-reserve of disposable inventory, thereby leaving the thing unnourished,
unprotected, and without its own event and truth.
The thing is necessary for nearing and encountering world and the world
that hides and violates things is a world-picture. This analysis of the enframing
of things could be called a formal indicative or critical model that indicates the
missing nearness and reality of the thing. Heidegger’s early conception of formal
indication (formale Anzeige) is of an emptying formalizing that opens the concrete
facticity and variety of ways of being.23 Formal indication is not only Heidegger’s
early conception of way. It could also be conceived of as a way of forming critical
models, to apply Adorno’s expression, to the extent that, as Heidegger articulates it
in the 1920s, it necessitates destructuring fixation (Destruktion) and differentiating
encounter (Auseinandersetzung). It thereby points toward that which is missing,
discloses closed-off and hidden possibilities. It intimates alternative ways of caring-for
and individuating existence. Heidegger’s early method of emptying through formal
indication is expanded and reoriented from human existence toward thing, place, and
world in his ensuing thinking of way that radicalizes this unfixing-opening structure.
The picturing, enframing, and positioning of the thing contrasts with its freedom
in the letting-releasement and saying that protects the thing and its truth (GA 76: 338).
Arendt notes how: “To thinking there belongs ‘Gelassenheit’—security, composure,
releasement, a state of relaxation, in brief, a disposition of ‘lets be’” (Arendt 2018b: 430).
In German mystical traditions, there are moments for God’s things to speak to us.
In that context, the letting be of things primarily means abandoning entanglements
and affairs that one learns to tolerate and accept, to open the soul to God. That is
not the Lao-Zhuang spontaneous embracing of the myriad things and the world in
their own self-becoming. Heidegger strikes a more Daoist than mystical tone in his
postwar thought in embracing one’s quotidian world-relations and pointing toward
things in a nonacting or nonintervention that allows the thing to be seen and heard.
In addition to the mystical state of mind of letting be, there is the Gelassenheit in and
of things in their own worldly occurring rather than in my own mental releasement.
Releasement, not unlike Daoist wuwei with which it is in dialogue, expresses not only a
comportment but further possibilities of things themselves granting mortals a guiding
measure (GA 13: 215).

8. The Measure of Things

Is there a measure on earth? In a range of early Chinese sources, which can help situate
early Daoism, thingly and environmental patterns provide models and measures
for humans. The legendary sovereign Fu Xi 伏羲 is said to have drawn the Book of
Changes’s eight trigrams based on observing the patterns of heaven and earth. Cang
Jie 倉頡 is said to have formed written characters based on the tracks of animals and
birds. The genuine measure (yidu 一度), according to the Yuandao, is following the
tracks (xungui 循軌) of things themselves (Lau and Ames 1998: 110–11).
50 Heidegger and Dao

The consummate measure, as expressed in the Daoistic Zhuangzi and the eclectic
Guanzi 管子 collections, is found in water (an image of the most indeterminate,
flexible, and encompassing of things) in its stillness, evenness, and clarity. Swirling
water undoes what is fixed, gathering and dispersing things through its movements.
Yet it is its stillness and emptiness that set the measure. In the Zhuangzi “Heavenly
Way” (tiandao 天道) chapter, water is taken as an exemplary measure for sages just as
the still level water (shui jing you ming 水靜猶明) provides the measure for carpenters
(dajiang qufa yan 大匠取法焉). The Guanzi “Water and Earth” chapter states that “the
water level is first among the five measures,” and as an elemental image of equalizing
and evenness, “water is the level for all things, the quality of tranquility in all life, and
the quality of impartiality between right and wrong, profit and loss.”24
For Heidegger, so-called modern Occidental thinking underscores in a variety
of ways the preeminence of the human, the mind, and the subject as the measure
of things.25 The deworlding of things is consummated in enframing. It signifies the
removal of the orientation of place, measure, and meaningfulness that is granted by
things and the localities and regions that gather around them. The modern crisis of
meaning is not due to the death of God or the subject. It transpires through the loss
of the sense of meaning-generating gathering things and the words that express their
encounter. Consequently, world, enacted and embodied in specific moments and
places, is viewed as a bare identity in the repetition of indifferent unfulfilled time and
the homogeneity of vacant space.
As Heidegger conveyed in his October 1955 lecture “Gelassenheit,” commemorating
the hometown musician Conradin Kreutzer, human releasement with respect to things
signifies making room for the releasement occurring in things themselves and in
their words prior to and after the questions and answers that restrain—evoking the
Daodejing—things and their mystery (GA 16: 527). This dimension of Heidegger’s
conception of releasement evokes the relational thing orientation of early Daoist
sources. In the language of the Heng Xian and the Zhuangzi, as shown in Chapter 1,
the “inaction” and letting of wuwei express a comportment that acknowledges the self-
acting (ziwei) of the thing.
Heidegger describes the prospect of the reflectively mindful and thoughtful
encounter with the thing: “we think of the thing as thing when we release the thing in
its thinging from the worlding of the world. In this way we thoughtfully let ourselves
be approached by the encompassing essencing of the thing” (GA 7: 182; GA 7: 20).
Heidegger’s expression “thoughtfully let” (andenkend lassen) means to allow the thing
(as it is of itself) to approach in responsive reminiscence of it in its lingering duration
and dwelling place. Genuine thoughtful thinking is an enactment of letting. To let
means the releasing-free of things and place; it is described as giving occasion to,
bringing about as bringing underway (zuwege-bringen), and releasing the enregioning
of the free region (GA 99: 61; GA 100: 23). Being and Time was centered on the ekstatic-
existential temporality of human existence. Now the temporalizing and spatializing
gathering of things, such as the stone and other “small things” that silently make up a
country path, is its moment and place. The stone expresses a world, and the dewdrop
reflects the universe. The saying of thinking is the echo of silence, the occurrence of
which remains a mystery (GA 97: 247).
 The Autopoietic Self-Transformation of Things 51

9. The Moment and Place of the Thing

Heidegger’s later expansive notion of the thing appears to intersect with Chinese images
and models of the thing and the gathering of the elemental in the thing. Nonliving and
living things are understood as a gathering of material and biospiritual forces (qi) in
the Chinese context. They do so such that there is no ultimate distinction between
internal and external, self and other, and kinds of being, insofar as they consist of a
temporary configuration of changing forces that form and dissipate. Each thing has
its own moment and place as it gathers and harmonizes in emptiness and oscillates
between the darkness (yin) from which they emerge and the brightness (yang) that
they hold.26 Strauss and Wilhelm translated qi (elemental force) as soul of nature
and life-breath, and yin-yang respectively as dormancy and activity and darkness
and light. Perhaps Heidegger’s attempts to translate the Daodejing with Paul Shih-yi
Hsiao contained this passage and reimagined it with a less metaphysical and more
poetic significance.
Darkness, hiddenness, mystery, and concealment are intertwined throughout
Wilhelm’s works. In his translation of Daodejing 65, pure life signifies concealed life
(verborgenes Leben, as he translates mysterious virtuosity [xuande 玄德]), which means
deep, far-reaching, and effective life (Wilhelm 1911: 70). Wilhelm describes elsewhere
how wonder swells up from the dark mystery of dao (Wilhelm 1925: 45). This mystery
is also described as concealment (Verborgenheit) from which the forces of life arise
(Wilhelm 1925: 61). Dao is the swelling primeval empty ground (chongxu 沖虛) in
the title of his 1921 translation of the Liezi. The thing emerges from the generative
fecund darkness of dao into the light in Wilhelm’s translation of Daodejing 42, which
mentions neither emptiness (chong 沖, rinsed or washed away), in affinity with
Heidegger’s earth and world of the 1935 “Origin of the Work of Art,” nor the earth
and sky of the 1949 Bremen Lectures. Heidegger expressed little interest in discourses
of life-forces in European vitalism, which remained biological and ontic, or in East
Asian qi-philosophy that was frequently connected with vitalism and pantheism in
his linguistic community. Nonetheless, this interculturally entangled imagery in works
familiar to Heidegger suggestively intermingles with his own discourse of earth,
world, and the moment and place of the gathering thing, even as the Daodejing is only
specifically mentioned, particularly between 1943 and 1950, in relation to the thing
and its emptiness.
Lao-Zhuang Daoism is often misinterpreted as a philosophy (or family of
philosophies) of the eternal dao. It is not about static atemporality but the continuing
dao (hengdao) operating through temporalizing things. In contrast with bifurcating
and fixating dao and thing, the constancy of the self is to be in accord—without
anxiety and disturbance—with the temporalizing meandering flow of things and
affairs. Inflexibility, rigidity, and fixation mean death for the embodied heart-mind
that is nourished and freed through an unrestricted communication and exchange.
Heidegger’s later notebooks explicitly recognize the theme of undoing fixation and
frozenness in the Daodejing. Winke I und II (his notebooks from 1957 to 1959) begins
by quoting Daodejing 43 on how the softest overcomes the hardest, the healing hidden
in stillness counters the fixated frozenness of things in restlessness (GA 101: 3).
52 Heidegger and Dao

Daodejing 43 describes how the softest breaks and overwhelms the hardest, how what
is without being (wuyou 無有) can enter even that which has no entrance (such as the
hardened and fixated), and how the benefits of acting without action and teaching
without words contrast with forced coercive active and speaking.
Did Heidegger’s extensive engagement with the Daodejing in the mid-1940s
help therapeutically undo hypostatization in his own thinking? There are questions
concerning bifurcation in Heidegger’s earlier thinking: issues of the potential
bifurcation and fixation of being and beings, the ontological and the ontic, which
threaten—as asserted by Heidegger’s critics—to coercively subsume and commit
violence to the particularity of persons and things. This is a genuine problematic in
Heidegger’s works of the 1930s. Heidegger’s late wartime and postwar reflections on
the thing point toward a different pathway: they demand—in a language that strongly
alludes to and periodically overtly refers to the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi—the
releasement of things and openness to their mystery (GA 16: 528).
What then is the mystery of the thing? It is bound to the thing’s own way of
temporalizing, spatializing, and speaking world. Neither time nor being can be
construed as things. They differ from the thing insofar as it is ontic and the ontological
cannot be conflated with the ontic. Nonetheless, Heidegger approaches the thing in
its own temporalizing as an ontic-ontological event irreducible to Dasein: “Each thing
has its own time” (GA 14: 6). Likewise, according to the 1969 lecture “Art and Space,”
“we ought to be able to recognize that the things themselves are places and do not
merely belong to place” (GA 13: 208). Each thing has its own “existential” moment
and place in which it is gathered and gathers world. This was an impossibility in
Being and Time and in his early period in which the primordial meanings of language
(Urbedeutungen der Sprache) relate to Dasein and not the thing (GA 17: 318). The
thing now can speak to and address me (“Das Ding spricht mich an”) even if not in a
human language (GA 89: 249). Human saying is entangled with the communication
and meaningfulness of things that open and configure places and localities for human
building and dwelling. One way of being-in-the-world is to inhabit, reside amidst, and
cultivate things and the environing world; the other extreme is to annihilate them and
struggle to persist amidst impoverished things and places stripped of their generative
nourishing autopoietic character.
Heidegger has accordingly shifted from the primacy of the projective constitutive
and still anthropocentric subject, elucidated as the ekstatic being-in-the-world of
Dasein in Being and Time, to the priority of the thing in encountering it. It is not
consciousness or the subject, even as embodied, enactive, and extended, but rather
things that constitute and orient a place. It is the thing that is formative of world. The
event of the thing can be described as the thingly worldly other-constitution of moment,
place, and sensibility. Things are not merely “there-for-me”; I am fundamentally
dependent on and enmeshed with things and their places in their emptiness and
materiality. These characteristics are underemphasized in the idealistic tendencies
of classical phenomenology and contemporary discourses that conceal them in the
embodiment, enactment, and extension of what remains—and much earlier than in the
final analysis—a constitutive subject. It is not phenomenology as driven by the subject
(whether conceived as consciousness or the body) that sets the measure, but things
 The Autopoietic Self-Transformation of Things 53

themselves in their myriad ways of being (thinging). The transcendental paradigm

of the constitutive subject, even when naturalized and pragmatized, underemphasizes
how the transcendental is inevitably ensnared and mediated in concrete historical life.
The philosophy of the subject occludes the thing in totalizing the subject’s perspective.
They are incapable of recognizing other-constitution of the self through the “other-
power” in things, places, mountains and rivers, environments, and open autopoietic
ecological systems.27 It is not abstracted matter, space, or unmediated objectness that
forms orienting localities where mortals abide, work, play, and linger; it is specific
concrete things that form them.
Inasmuch as the language of modern Occidental philosophy prioritizes the subject
and identity, an insight expressed in distinctive ways by Heidegger and his critics
Adorno and Levinas, other ways of speaking and philosophizing are vital. This concern
informs the language of radical non-identity and the priority of the object in Adorno’s
confrontation with identity-thinking. He regards identity-thinking as repressing
contradictions and differences that need intensification rather than dialectical
consonance, while Levinas addresses ethical alterity and priority of the other in
opposition to totality. Heidegger’s later reorientation toward the thing, drawing on the
“poetic thinking” of Daoists, poets, and thinkers, means turning to forms of poetic
saying that are mindfully attentive and responsive to the particularities of the thing.
Poetic letting and releasing, in which things are kept safe as the things that they are,
consequently form “the higher clarity that allows things to appear in their own ways
and grants mortals their measure” (GA 13: 215).
Heidegger’s later poetics of the thing would speak with things more directly
and intimately than subject-oriented phenomenology. Here, time and space are not
absolute containers in which things occur; nor are they forms of intuition (as in Kant)
or correlational intentional consciousness (as in Husserl) through which things are
constituted in experience. Time and space occur and are encountered vis-à-vis the
temporalizing and spatializing of things. This dynamic is world-formative and full of
the world in which it is concealed: hiding the thing in the world, to adjust a statement
from the Zhuangzi often construed—following Guo Xiang—as abiding undisturbed in
the pure immanence of transformation, while the thing hides in and from the world.28

III. Complications with Things

10. The Thing as Resistance, Complexly Mediated, and Withdrawing

In this concluding section, the discussion is widened as three sets of questions about
the thing, the thing in itself, and the possibility of an ethics of things are posed in
ways that set the stage for Part One’s subsequent chapters that focus on the emptiness,
uselessness, and a comportment of care and nurturing the life of things in which the
thing irreducibly exceeds pragmatically positioned raw material.
Heidegger remarked in the artwork essay how thinking seems to face the greatest
opposition from the thing in its thingness as the inconspicuous non-appearing thing
unyieldingly draws away from it (GA 5: 16–17). A difficulty concerning understanding
54 Heidegger and Dao

the thing is that its apparent givenness, simplicity, and unity hide that which resists
and escapes perception and conception of the thing, and the complex formation of the
senses and meaning that allow a thing to be merely perceived. The thing resists, escapes,
and furthermore can—depending on the thing—endanger those who approach it.
There are three ways of describing the thing’s inaccessibility from Heidegger’s
historical situation and reception that contextualize, complicate, and potentially
challenge his later philosophy of the thing.
First, the thing has been characterized as that which resists and stands over and
against (Gegen-stand) the perceiver as a facticity irreducible to the subject, thus
constituting its sense of facticity and external reality. Wilhelm Dilthey identified
the thing with force, resistance, and restraint, qualities that form the subject’s sense
of external reality, in his 1890 work “The Origin of Our Belief in the Reality of the
External World and Its Justification.” According to a later note, “[t]he thing is the
correlate of sensation, and the feeling of resistance is its condition” as the categories of
life are formed in relation to the forces and things that compel and resist the subject
hardening its sense of the facticity of reality (Dilthey 2004).
Second, the complexity of the thing seems to demand an archaeology in which
it disappears instead of a phenomenology of its appearing. The neo-vitalist Hans
Driesch argued against the direct phenomenological seeing of the thing as the lived
experience of the thing, regarding its appearance of “being-there” to be a complexly
mediated formation of sense, meaning, and the construction of experiential order
(Driesch 1938: 136). More radical is the elimination of the thing in the emerging
logical empiricist program of Rudolf Carnap in the 1920s. He analyzed the thing as a
complex interpretive fiction, formed from basic experiential and logical elements into
which it can be dissolved and reconstructed (Carnap 1924: 130). The thing consists of
projection based on matter, sensation, and abstraction.
Third, the reality of the thing outstrips the experientially, linguistically, and
conceptually mediated thing, or the symbolic thing, as in Lacan’s differentiation of thing
as signified and as beyond signification. There is something of the thing that inevitably
withdraws, as Heidegger puts it, and escapes, as Derrida points out: “Contrary to what
phenomenology—which is always phenomenology of perception—has tried to make
us believe, contrary to what our desire cannot fail to be tempted into believing, the
thing itself always escapes” (Derrida 1989: 9).
The thing has identity and unity over time and space vis-à-vis intentional
consciousness. To be fair, Husserl himself recognized in his phenomenology of the
thing the shading and appearing/non-appearing of the thing in the figure/ground
relation, and the potentially infinite variation through which the self-appearing thing
is perceived as a unity in its open and indeterminate horizon (Husserl 2003: 6, 114–15).
The hiddenness of the thing in the perception of the thing is a non-accidental facet of
the thing rather than the basis of an objection that would refute its being and meaning.
The hiddenness, potential dangerousness, and uncanniness of the thing call for
humility in the face of the depth and manifoldness of the thing and an openness to
appropriately adapt to the flowing, transforming patterns of things. The thing calls
for its own forms of “leaping-ahead,” as Heidegger described in a crucial passage in
the 1937–38 lecture-course Basic Questions of Philosophy: it is not a coercive knowing
 The Autopoietic Self-Transformation of Things 55

as mastering from which the thing qua thing necessarily withdraws and escapes.
Philosophy is not a scientific knowledge of things and their essence; nor is it purely the
inventing, forming, and imposing of concepts.
What then is philosophy? Evoking the traditional Aristotelian definition of
philosophy as the science of the essence of things while revising it in a quasi-Daoistic
fashion, Heidegger defines philosophy as a useless opening knowing in anticipatory
leaping-ahead of the self-concealing essencing of things (GA 45: 3, 29). It is here
that the openness of the thing as thing begins to surface as distinct from the thing
as available and useful for human existence (GA 45: 19–20). Intending the thing,
and hence representation, already presupposes its openness (GA 45: 24). Knowing
requires this openness of the thing and the opening making place for the thing in its
appearing and non-appearing; Heidegger analyzed this as its unconcealment and self-
concealment (das Sichverbergen). The self-reflexive or self-relational “self ” or “itself,”
expressed in the German third-person reflexive pronoun “sich,” indicates that it is an
aspect of the thing itself and not purely a failure of experience and conception that is
at stake.

11. The Question of the “Thing in Itself ”

Let us continue to question the thing. A crucial facet of the thing is the thing’s self-
withdrawal, self-concealment, and its arising and functioning from nothingness that
early Lao-Zhuang sources address. They do so without bifurcating the thing into
the appearing thing and the thing in itself in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason or the
signified symbolically ordered thing and the thing as alien, uncanny, and real beyond
signification in Lacan’s thing-theory.29
In Heidegger’s interpretations of Kant’s appearing and non-appearing thing
during the 1920s and 1930s, Kant’s thing-in-itself is a distinctive way of relating to
the thing, another perspective on it (GA 3: 33; GA 25: 99). It is an unusual relation
to or perspective on the thing, such as God as the ultimate most distant thing, since
it is removed from all attestation and unavailable in every way to human knowledge
(GA 41: 5, 130). Neither God nor things are interpreted as unconditional otherness or
Lacanian monstrousness.
As described earlier, Heidegger does have a sense of the uncanniness and violence
of nature as phúsis that he celebrated as creative in the mid-1930s. The uncanniness
of the thing appears in Heidegger in the breakdown of its usefulness, its missing
absence, and its technological annihilation. In addressing the thing’s otherness, it is
characteristically described more in the sense of awe, wonder, and the sublime than
in the sense of the alien monstrousness of Lacan’s reimagining of Freud’s thing (Lacan
1992: 43–5, 62–3).
The thing’s self-occurring and self-concealing (self in the sense of “zi” and “sich”)
require a transition from the phenomenology of (1) what appears to intentional or
embodied consciousness and appearances as describable and graspable, to (2) what
appears as resisting, escaping, and withdrawing in the self-concealment of the thing,
to (3) what does not appear at all while being at work in the self-naturing of the
thing (i.e., nothingness and emptiness). This free and easy shifting through manifold
56 Heidegger and Dao

perspectives, equalizing the myriad things, and undoing fixation and bifurcation,
is necessary for an appropriate encountering of and dwelling with the thing in the
freedom of its own becoming.
This perspective of the freedom of the thing entails a different ethos or way of
dwelling that recognizes their self-becoming as well as their anthropocentrically
demarcated use. It contrasts with the demand for the domination of nature expressed
in the early Chinese context in Xunzi’s criticisms of Zhuangzi that external and
internal nature must be actively controlled and forcefully reshaped; we see these in
the Baconian vision of the mastery of nature analyzed in Horkheimer and Adorno’s
Dialectic of Enlightenment, or in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit that deems the
freedom of the thing as self-contradictory and asserts that every free thing without a
master must be turned into controlled and useful property (Hegel 1986: 318). But in
forgetting and obscuring the life of things, the domination of nature does not lead to
the freedom of spirit from nature over which it rules, as Hegel proposed. It is, rather,
human enslavement as a piece of dominated nature, as Adorno and Horkheimer
diagnosed.30
“Nature” and things as free from the ostensive necessity of domination, sacrifice
and usefulness appear improbable amidst the prevailing devastation and plight that
is more than ecological. Yet, as Heidegger reiterates from Hölderlin, “where there is
danger, that which saves grows also.”31 That is to say, there is resistance where there
is coercion, and the danger brings forth its response. The plight itself demands
and animates the freedom of nature as—to think with and beyond Heidegger to
question the present—an exemplary image, an orienting bearing and comportment,
a responsive releasement and awaiting, a prophetic calling, and a critical social and
environmental model.

12. Questioning the Ethos of Things

The prospect of this other ethos and voice entails conceptual and existential
questions that will be considered in a preliminary way here and more fully addressed
in Chapter 5. In addition to the questions of the reality and fictiveness, fullness
and poverty, of the thing as appearing and non-appearing, there are difficulties
concerning the ethos of nurturing life or, to recall Okakura’s description, the way
and art of being-in-the-world as dwelling with and amidst things. Two questions,
informed by the critical readings of Heidegger conveyed by Levinas and Adorno,
could be posed at this juncture.
First, is it possible to be responsive to things in free and easy mimetic and
correlational relationships (which undo fixations) as opposed to slavish and fearful
ones (which establish fixations instead of shifting through them), and without
fetishism and idolatry? The former is requisite to confront the degradation of living
and nonliving things even as the latter worry—expressed by Levinas in his 1961 essay
“Heidegger, Gagarin, and Us” (Levinas 1990: 231–4)—must be genuinely addressed
and avoided. Secondly, does a change in the culture and way of inhabiting the earth
require a correlated transformation in economic and social conditions? Heidegger
admittedly inadequately interrogates material relations of production, exchange, and
 The Autopoietic Self-Transformation of Things 57

consumption under existing capitalist structures and, according to his contemporary

Adorno, obscures and mystifies them.32
The critical interrogations of Adorno and Levinas, as polemical yet observant
readers of Heidegger’s rural agrarian imaginary, indicate missing corners of the
square: the importance of not neglecting interhuman relations and the material and
political-economic circumstances of human existence. Nonetheless, despite trenchant
philosophical and social-political problems in Heidegger’s thought, confronting the
ongoing alienation, commodification, and reification of human existence calls for
contesting what has become of things and environments as well as persons in order to
encounter them with ecophronesis in a more appropriate and receptive way, as having
self-generating patterns, processes, and permutations of their own.33
Reconstructing and reimagining Heidegger’s later Daoist-informed philosophy of
the thing offers a significant formal indication, critical model, and guiding thread for
confronting the contemporary degradation of things and environments precisely in
insisting on (1) nonpurposive and non-pragmatic doing and letting, and (2) poetic
listening to and saying thing and world as the fundamental capacity for human
dwelling.34 Heidegger’s later conception does not speak of creative violent assertion for
the sake of instituting new worlds and ways of being in which being more authentically
and coercively holds sway. In the turn toward the thing, the poetic signifies attending
to and learning from things and the environing world and adopting the appropriate
exemplary words in interthingly and interworldly interpolation with them.

13. Buber and Heidegger as Thinkers of the Thing

I wish to conclude this chapter by insisting on Buber’s historical and philosophical
importance. Literature on Heidegger has distinct reasons for ignoring Buber’s writings,
even as they intersect with and inspired some of Heidegger’s conceptual usage and
linguistic play. Intriguingly, given his repeated references and debts to Buber’s
rendition of the Zhuangzi, Heidegger is not the first to draw connections between
Daoism, modern technology, and different prospects of interacting with things.35 Buber
clarified these interconnections and the significance of Daoist wuwei as a response to
the pathologies of technological modernity in his 1928 lecture “China and Us” (Buber
203: 285–9). Buber insisted on the ethical implications of early Daoist sources. Instead
of rejecting modernity, the liberating ideas of 1789, and the Enlightenment, Buber’s
vision of Daoism allows for a reorientation away from domination, power, and the
struggle for existence toward a genuine being-with-others, nurturing creatures, and
co-creating the world.
Buber was an early decisive source for Heidegger’s interpretation of Daoism.
Buber is known for privileging I-thou over I-it relationships. But, at the same time, he
elucidated alternative ways of relating to the “it,” drawing from Daoist discourses of
the thing and its mystery in the 1910s and 1920s in ways that intersect with Heidegger.
Buber remarked in a 1924 lecture “The Religious World-Conception,” given a few
months after his August Ascona lectures on the Daodejing, “to view things without
their mystery means to make them imaginary, it means to live with ghosts” rather
than with genuine things.36 We forget the thing as our names fail to grasp them and
58 Heidegger and Dao

their mystery (Buber 2013: 228). The thing is altered into a mere object of desire and
use, as described for instance in Hegel’s Phenomenology (Hegel 1986: 318), when it
is broken from the encounter and taken out of the fullness of its relational context
(Buber 2013: 232). Still, there is more to the thing than use, exchange, and consumption.
It is this corner of the square, the life and mystery of the thing articulated in Buber and
Heidegger that constitutes the primary focus of Part One of the present book.
What then of the Daoist thing and Heidegger’s thing that has begun to emerge in
the first two chapters? Is it a contingent accident that Heidegger’s turn toward the thing
in its priority as world-formative, and no longer worldlessly at-hand, coincided with
his intensive engagement with the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi during 1943–1951?
This intercultural entangled nexus is elucidated in the next chapters on the empty
and the useless unnecessary thing, with an eye toward other ways of dwelling and
encountering—in-the-world with and amidst things in the expansive sense of their
own ways of being.
 3

Heidegger and Laozi’s Daodejing:

The Gathering Emptiness of Thing and Place

I. Dao with and without Image and Word

1. Heidegger and the German Reception of Daoism

There is a long tradition of skepticism concerning Heidegger’s Daoist affinities.
Karl Löwith, a student and subsequent critic of Heidegger who taught in Japan
from 1936 to 1941, noticed Heidegger’s Daoist-sounding language and doubted its
genuineness. He questioned in his 1960 essay “Remarks on the Difference between
Orient and Occident” whether Heidegger’s releasement could overcome Occidental
subjectivity and that, with Heidegger’s earlier purposive for-the-sake-of-which and
dictates of being, it could truly come near to the non-differentiation of subject and
object in the originary unity of being-in-the-world of acting without action (wuwei)
(Löwith 1983: 600).
Measured according to the standpoint of Löwith’s claim, Heidegger offers at best
a flawed misappropriation of Daoism that cannot approach its truth. Of course,
Heidegger never presented himself as an advocate or scholar of Daoism, and his
later philosophy of the thing does not merely copy or plagiarize statements from the
Daodejing but rather reimagines them in his own philosophical discourse. Nonetheless,
Heidegger is a thinker of way and being-underway even more than being or meaning.1
He states multiple times that “way” (Weg) is the elemental word and that the step
(Schritt) between being and beings and the movement of the way (be-wegen) is the
summation of his thinking (GA 98: 57). His commonly misinterpreted quasi-Daoist (in
the ziranist sense) turn toward the thing (i.e., the thing as indicating much more than
a pragmatic worldless entity) in the 1940s is intertwined with his multiple imperfect
yet provocative engagements with the Daoist thing as articulated in the Daodejing and
the Zhuangzi.2 This interculturally mediated modern encounter with ancient sources
is without doubt a reimagining and adaptation of Daoist imagery and strategies in
Heidegger’s distinctive philosophical scene, formed by its own presuppositions,
purposes, and stakes.
The problems of German modernity shaped Heidegger’s response to Daoism,
much as they did those of his contemporaries. Alfred Döblin’s remarkable 1916
modernist-Daoist novel The Three Leaps of Wang Lun (Die drei Sprünge des Wang-
lun) began with Döblin “sacrificing” the work in dedication to the Daoist sage Liezi
60 Heidegger and Dao

(Döblin 2013: 8), a figure known for freely riding the wind. Faber and Wilhelm both
translated the Liezi, and it was a familiar text to German language audiences. Döblin’s
novel contemplated the interconnections between wuwei, social-political oppression,
and revolutionary violence through a fictionalized account of the eighteenth-century
Shandong White Lotus rebel leader Wang Lun 王倫 (Detering 2008: 45–54). This
novel helped inspire the engagement with Chinese thought in Marxist writers such as
Bertolt Brecht and Anna Seghers. Brecht’s mid-1930s reflections in the unpublished
Book of Twists and Turns (Buch der Wendungen), voiced through a fictionalized
version of the non-Daoist moral philosopher Me Ti (Mo Di 墨翟, c. 470–391 bce),
addressed Chinese philosophy, Marxist dialectics, and contemporary politics with
the question of how to appropriately intervene in the flow and transitions of things.3
Ernst Bloch’s reflections on Daoism likewise concerned utopian political questions.
Buber appealed in 1928 to wuwei against the Occidental fetishizing of power in “China
and us,” while Count von Keyserling pondered in 1919 Butcher Ding’s effortless ox-
cutting as an image of nourishing life while observing the mechanized death of the
Chicago stockyards.4
Heidegger’s interpretive encounter with these early Daoist sources in translation,
which intriguingly intersects with other Weimar-era explications of Daoism, from
Ludwig Klages on the political right to Buber and Bloch on the left, oscillates around his
concerns with the thing and the word in relation to his own hermeneutical situation.
This situation is informed by (1) technological modernity that, as an enframing world-
picture, has neutralized words of their sense and devastated nonliving and living things;
and, as traced in the previous chapter, (2) the failures—that Heidegger thematizes,
albeit insufficiently answers—of his own philosophical and political thinking of the
self-assertion of the will and creative sacrifice through the work during the 1930s.5

2. Chinese and German Images of Gathering and Emptiness

We might consider here connections between gathering and emptiness prior to
Heidegger. According to the Daodejing, the dao has neither image nor name, and yet it
evokes and resonates in the image and in the word. The primary imageless image to be
pursued in this chapter is that of gathering in emptiness, which Heidegger finds in Lao-
Zhuang sources. This imagery in the German context is not new, even as Heidegger
reimagines it in his own style of thinking. The gathering empty valley, empty ground,
and the groundless abyss are longstanding images of dao in Chinese sources and their
German language reception.
Joseph von Görres pioneered the study of mythology in Germany. He wrote in
his 1810 History of the Myths of the Asiatic World that “Dao is life, an abyss of all
perfections, contains all beings, is itself decree and exemplar, but (for the creature) is
unfathomable” (Görres 1810: 184). For Strauss in his 1870 edition of the Daodejing,
dao is the empty abyss from which all things arise and return (Strauss 1870: 188).
According to Rudolf Dvořák’s 1895 book on Chinese religions, the empty dao is
a bottomless abyss (bodenloser Abgrund) in which all the waters of the earth can
flow and gather without ever being filled (Dvořák 1895: 42). The dao generates and
nourishes; it also gathers and disperses. This gathering function is seen in a variety of
 Heidegger and Laozi’s Daodejing 61

German translations and interpretations that continue to resonate in Heidegger’s ways

of speaking.
“Gathering” is a guiding word in Heidegger’s terminology, as he interpreted the
root meaning of saying (lógos) as gathering. The early Greek gathering in saying and
the emptying of the soul of German mysticism undoubtedly play significant roles in
his thinking. Nonetheless, there is a specific emptiness of things and words in Daoist
(and, as seen in Part Two, Buddhist) sources from which Heidegger draws and rarely
explicitly mentions. His emphasis on gathering in emptiness speaks to an interpretive
model linked with Laozi, as he recurrently evokes Daoist forms of gathering in his
descriptions of the fourfold, the thing, language, and emptiness.
An image that reappears in classic Lao-Zhuang texts is that emptiness draws
together and enfolds, establishing places and forms of coming together. The dao is
the empty hollow (chong 沖) that is filled and vacated by swirling waters and the
filling and pouring out of the empty vessel in Daodejing 4 and 11 (Lou 1980: 10, 27).
The valley is an image of the empty yet fecund open where waters gather. Aperture
(kong 孔) is another Daoist thought-image of emptiness (Lou 1980: 52). Nothingness
(wu) also functions as emptiness in the figure of the empty vessel (Lou 1980: 26–7).
Klages, a figure dismissed by Heidegger as a popular philosopher (GA 29/30: 105),
takes this, in his discussion of Daodejing 11 in Spirit as Adversary of the Soul, to imply
that Daoist nothingness signifies emptiness, linking it with the Buddhist dharma and
the symbolism of the zero.6
Another term for emptiness occurs in the Daodejing and in a well-known passage
from the Zhuangzi. It states that the “fasting of the heart-mind” (xinzhai 心齋) is an
awaiting of things in stillness and emptiness (xuer daiwu 虛而待物), which Heidegger
calls to mind in the third Country Path Conversation, as the dao gathers only in
emptiness (weidao jixu 唯道集虛). This expression for emptiness (xu 虛) is often
linked with meditative or biospiritual states in which the heart-mind is emptied and
can receive the world. Xu as enacting emptiness refers in the Daodejing to a practice
interlinked with other practices of simplifying, stilling, and becoming tasteless, plain,
and bland. Comparable to the Hebrew word “hevel” (empty, vapor) in the Ketuvim
Book of Qohelet (Ecclesiastes), it can also signify vanity, futility, and falseness.
The translations of Victor von Strauss (1870), Martin Buber (1910), and Richard
Wilhelm (1911, 1912), with which Heidegger was familiar, gave readers a sense of
the prominence of emptiness in the texts ascribed to Laozi and Zhuangzi. Wilhelm
translated this passage as “the soul becomes empty and becomes capable of receiving
the world in itself. And it is the SENSE [SINN, as he translated dao, noting its archaic
senses] that fills this emptiness. This being-empty is the fasting of the heart” (Wilhelm
1912: 29). Adopting a model of mysticism, Buber translates the heart-mind’s emptiness
as a state of the soul’s detachment (Ablösung) in which the dao dwells (Buber 2013:
60). Further, Misch, a philosopher with whom Heidegger interacted in the 1920s
and whose work Heidegger knew, explored this Zhuangzi passage at length in “The
Way into Philosophy,” a 1926 study of the heterogeneous origins of philosophy in
breakthrough (Durchbruch) and life-reflection (Lebensbesinnung). Misch depicts
the pouring (ergießen) into and out of the dao’s stillness and emptiness in the self ’s
emptiness and detachment (Loslösung) (Misch 1926: 267).
62 Heidegger and Dao

The links between thing, gathering, and emptiness in Heidegger’s Gelassenheit,

as a form of dwelling, are indicative of a Daoist configuration; in particular, in how
it prioritizes gathering and dispersing movement in emptiness (as in Misch) and
openness to receiving the world (as in Wilhelm). How Heidegger engaged with the
Daoist language of emptiness will be traced in the current chapter on the emptiness of
the thing as well as in Part Two that concerns nothingness and emptiness.
The second part will delineate the interaction of Occidental, Daoist, and Buddhist
varieties of nothingness and emptiness in Heidegger and his early East Asian reception.
In the latter part, to glimpse ahead, we consider the extent to which emptiness is the
site of gathering in “From a Dialogue on Language” in which the absence of the friend,
Kuki Shūzō 九鬼周造 (1888–1941), in reminiscence is the gathering of that which
endures (namely, the memory of the friend). Likewise, the dialogue discloses how the
emptiness of language is the gathering of words; the emptiness (now using a Buddhist
informed image) of sky allows for the gathering of color and form. In the current
chapter, it is the emptiness of the thing as the site of the gathering of world that is in
question.

3. Dao as Guiding-Word
The present work centers around a Chinese word. It appears in the title of the Chinese
text, the Daodejing, most frequently mentioned and evoked in Heidegger’s corpus. The
most frequently mentioned East Asian (indeed, non-Occidental) word appearing in
his works is dao 道. Dao signifies way. It can also mean discourse, principle, teaching,
saying, and guiding, as Wilhelm points out (Wilhelm 1911: XV). Its cognate dao 導
means to guide or direct. The originary guiding word dao, which Heidegger describes
as a mystery, resonates with his own basic originary word Weg (way) with which he
stylizes his own journey in thinking.
This has a larger hermeneutical context worth considering. Heidegger’s ways of
speaking recall earlier German language interpretations of dao that inform Heidegger’s
linguistic community, while being distinctive from them.7 The art historian and
collector Otto Fischer wrote, for example, in his popular 1923 book on Chinese
landscape painting: “The Chinese designated [the sense of nature and the essence of
life] with the ancient mystery word dao. Long before Laozi and Confucius, dao, the
sense and the way, is the deepest word in which all anticipation and all knowledge
are hidden” (Fischer 1923: 165). According to Fischer, dao is not force (Kraft) but the
opposite of force; imageless, it encompasses all images; groundless and abyssal yet
containing all beings. Dao signals the emptiness, the zero point, the pivot, and the
mystery of being. Chinese art enacts the nature it depicts, following and embodying
the dao of the thing and the scene.8
Misch critiqued the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger in 1930 from
the perspective of Dilthey’s hermeneutical life philosophy, a work that Husserl and
Heidegger mention. In it, Misch described the force of originary speech and how
lógos, as the root word of the beginnings of Occidental philosophy and the science of
logic, correlated with dao and brahma as the primordial words of the East.9 Primordial
words such as dao were depicted by Misch as a completing or perfecting holding sway
 Heidegger and Laozi’s Daodejing 63

(vollkommenen Walten) that stand between myth