Heidegger's Hidden Sources: East Asian Influences on His Work

Rating:
Summary: As in love and war, all is fair in philosophy
Review: I rate this 5 stars just to get it up to 4, which is about right, I think.

Let us recall the socio-political climate of the times when Marty was in agony over the West's metaphysical tradtion. Philosophy was more or less sputtering at the time for want of something to fresh say. Who at that time was saying something totally unheard of; something so funky and seductively nonsensical that one had to squeeze some new meaning into them? Richard Wilhelm the sinologist had just translated the I JING and was giving lectures to small groups. Heigdegger was most certainly aware of Wilhelm's work.

The author (May) was Heidegger's student and saw some things first hand. If May's claims are correct (I have no overwhelming evidence to suspect he is not), then indeed, we should pay a little more attention to how Heidegger went about getting some of his ideas. Marty hired a Chinese doctoral student to help him privately (maybe even secretly) to translate the Lao Dze's DAO DE JING. He was quite studious about it, apparently.

One might argue that some of May's findings of connections between Heidegger's work and Daoist literature are circumstantial. Maybe they are. Here's a short list, with Heidegger's terms first then Daoist in *( ): The Open / Clearing *(Emptiness); Pathway *(Dao); etc. There's more.

Zhuang Dze (22): "What gives things their thingness is not itself a thing."
Marty: "The thingness of the thing...itself cannot be a thing again."
And the famous formulation in 'Being and Time': "The Being of beings 'is' not itself a being."

Alright, so what of it? Great minds think alike? Maybe. Marty learned a few things from the Chinese? Also maybe. But that's not the question one should be asking in a gesture of dismissal.
May's book is not an 'expose' of something embarrassing that Heidegger wanted to hide in shame. Anxiety of influence, etc. Rather, I think Heidegger was right to not acknowledge the Chinese influence in his work -- if only to keep those who will come after him to stay within the straight and narrow of the Western tradition of 'philosophy' as such.
Besides, Marty probably saw it as a bank loan that would be erased once it has served its purpose and paid back with interest. Whatever the source of his ideas, one could argue that Heidegger more than paid the loan back: After all, the house is rebuilt and new rooms are being added even as we speak. (As an architect, I couldn't vouch for the soundness of the structure, however.)

Poor sales of this book indicates that professors who cannot get enough of this guy's work/life do not make this book mandatory reading for their students. Which is strange but also understandable: they just don't wanna "go there" since that would entail extra exegetical work and uncertain forays into unfamiliar territories from which they might end up fetching the wrong things and make fools of themselves. Or, maybe there exists something like 'Code Red' (the unwritten 'don't go there' policy) that reflects something inherently, unbreakably Euro-centric (Judeo-Xtian)within contemporary (Occidental) critical theory, despite all the politically correct-sounding rhetoric.

The bulk of postmodern thinking is about the problem of 'thinking without metaphysics' which amounts to 'thinking without Christianity' more or less: an impossibel task -- sort of like performing a total dissection on oneself and wanting to live to tell about it.
Unfortunately, most thinkers in the West go about trying to solve this agonizing problem as if there were no other models of thinking worthy of their attention. (Or else they get all bent out of shape torturing language and themselves over something like, "the psychoanalytic politics/ethics of post-colonial ap/propriation of dis/avowal of the Other in the absence of the Subject as the Thing.") Levinas was perhaps most honest about this when he expressed his horror of the 'Yellow Peril' as an alien mode of thought so alien as to be Martian.

Stubborness? Pride? An unspoken attitude of smugness and sense of superiority derived fron the very patriarchal edifice they want to deconstruct? Much of the high-flying rhetoric about being open to 'diversity' and 'what-comes' falls a little flat in the provincial attitude within modern high theory that would relegate all 'Other' to East Asian Studies, anthropology, or Buddhist Studies. So, same pie, just sliced into different shapes, less sugar, thinner crust, but in the end, still the same pie.

The question remains: WHY did Marty feel he had to take out a loan from a bank so far away?
Francois Jullien's books including the very enlightening 'Detour and Access' (see my review) might be helpful if you really want to know -- and also get a head start on figuring out what one version of Deleuze's ideas has been.

Rating:
Summary: Informative at Points, but Ultimately a Disappointment
Review: This book is ultimately a very mixed bag. As a contribution to serious Heidegger scholarship, it certainly provides a good deal of biographical information that has been unavailable up until this point, particularly regarding Heidegger's connection with Japanese and Chinese philosophers in the 1940s and 1950s. At the same time, the underlying thesis, which is occasionally explicit, is that Heidegger stole everything from Taoism. As an interpretive thesis, this offers little that could help someone understand Heidegger in even the slightest degree. While this short book definately kept my interest, it turned out to ultimately leave me wondering whether or not is was really a book about Heidegger at all.