Known as one of the most influential Western philosophers of the twentieth century, Martin Heidegger’s connection with Eastern thinking, both as he as influenced it and as it has influenced him, has long been an area of debate. In a very detailed and comprehensive article called Heidegger’s Comportment Toward East-West Dialogue, Lin Ma and Jaap van Brakel tackle the question of Heidegger’s relationship with the East by examining remarks and actions he takes towards the subject. As they attempt to establish his attitude towards this East-West dialogue they re-examine overused and misleading quotations, ultimately leading them to the claim that while Heidegger did periodically mention the necessity of communication between the East and the West, any dialogue that Heidegger might have attempted to foster and sustain was based off of his larger desire to connect with past thinkers, specifically Greek, to go back to the first beginning and core of philosophy, and to overcome the problem of metaphysics. They further assert that while Heidegger might have looked towards the East at one point or another for help in overcoming these concerns, in the end the language barrier existing between the East and West proved to make such thoughts inaccessible to him.
While there are several occasions where Heidegger mentions an engagement with foreign ideas, specifically Greek, Ma and van Brakel argue that it is not until the 1950’s that Heidegger really begins to engage with the possibility of an East-West thought exchange. Ma and van Brakel critique other examiners of Heidegger who take his earlier mentions of Chinese, Japanese, and even Indian philosophy out of context of his larger philosophical goals. According to them, many Heideggerian scholars incorrectly quote statements from Heidegger concerning the East to mistakenly support arguments of a stronger connection between him and Eastern thought than truly exists. They point to Heidegger’s failed collaboration with Paul Shihi-yi Hsiao in 1946 and their attempts to translate passages from Laozi, (his most persistent commitment to ancient Chinese thought), to show his hesitancy in committing to a full and fruitful engagement with Eastern thought. As Heidegger says about his project with Hsiao:
I remain skeptical where I am not at home in the language; I became even more
skeptical when the Chinese, who is himself a Christian theologian and philosopher,
translated with me a few words of Lao Tze. Through questioning, I came to
realize how alien the whole nature of language already is for us; we then gave up
the attempt (Ma and van Brakel 533).
While they never deny his interest and curiosity in investigating Eastern thought as he believed in its potential to help him in his philosophical inquires, Ma and van Brakel argue that his investigations lead to a stand still where a further dialogue would offer no help because of the irrefutable barrier of language. As Heidegger later says in an interview with Der Spiegel: “thinking can be transformed only by a thinking that has the same origin and calling” (Ma and van Brakel 545). Heidegger consistently states a necessity to carry on a dialogue with and inhabit past thinkers, and in this way he turns towards Eastern thought as a possible portal to reach answers pertaining to metaphysics and the beginnings of philosophy. His attitude towards these Eastern thoughts however turns apathetic, as these ideas prove unattainable to him because of their foreign origins. Ma and van Brakel maintain that there is a connection between Heidegger and Eastern thought, certainly as Heidegger attempted to find answers in its history, but uphold that it does not hold the philosophical significance that others so willingly give to it.
Ma, Lin and van Brakel, Jaap, “Heidegger’s Comportment Toward East-West Dialogue.” Philosophy East and West. Vol. 56, Issue 4, 2006.