Publication Details

Abstract

This contribution reconsiders standard accounts of Heidegger’s concept of being as presence by tracing other moments revealed in his thinking of nothingness, emptiness, and the clearing in the context of his European and East Asian sources. Heidegger’s interpretations of Parmenides, early Greek philosophy, and of being as presencing (Anwesenheit) appear to assert the primordiality of “the one” and a hypostatized, monistic “metaphysics of presence.” This paper sketches a pivotal alternative thread within Heidegger’s thinking, most evident in his interactions with East Asian discourses, by outlining how a distinctive interpretation of nothingness, emptiness, absence, darkness, hiddenness, and mystery emerged in his readings of Laozi and Zhuangzi and in his dialogue with a Japanese interlocutor. Heidegger’s East Asian sources informed a key thread and model of his thinking that refused to reduce constitutive absence, emptiness, and nothingness to givenness, positivity, and presence or the logic of affirmation.