Abstract
What is the philosophical significance of Heidegger’s interpretation of the Japanese notion of kotoba (言葉) for Japanese philosophy? Was his conversation with Tezuka Tomio a real dialogue or not? To answer to these correlated questions, I elucidate Heidegger’s 1954 essay “A Dialogue on Language” by following a topological mode of thinking, and I inquire into the way-making of a “thinking conversation”. First, I problematize whether Heidegger engaged in a genuine dialogue with Tezuka. To that end, I distinguish the hermeneutic horizon of the actual encounter between Tezuka and Heidegger from Heidegger’s essay which places Tezuka (the Japanese) and Heidegger (the Inquirer) in a fictional philosophical conversation. Second, I argue that Heidegger’s topological method of interpretating kotoba can be read as a poetic means of thematizing East-West dialogue. Third and finally, exploring the topological sense of kotoba, I engage with third generation Kyoto School thinker Ueda Shizuteru’s idea of “hollow words” of language, situated in a twofold view of the world. I conclude that the true character of Heidegger’s conversation with Tezuka can be identified neither in Heidegger’s “actual” encounter with Tezuka, nor merely in Heidegger’s “hollow” essay. Departing from Ueda’s account of kotoba, it appears that a genuine conversation with language can be located in the dialogue of actuality and hollowness, which finds it expression in poetic language.
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Notes
Here I would like to offer to the reader an alternative order of reading the article. Those who are more interested in the philosophical argumentation as to why Heidegger’s interpretation of kotoba is located between actuality and hollowness, can read the fifth and last section entitled “5. Ueda’s kotoba: The Two-way Movement in Language” (starting on page 13) immediately after the section entitled “2. Distinguishing the Two Dialogues: The Meeting in Freiburg and Heidegger’s Essay” (starting on page 5). The reason I did not organize the article accordingly has two reasons: first, I believe that in order to do justice to the core matter of Heidegger’s essay on kotoba, which is the occurrence of stillness in a thinking dialogue that does not objectify its subject matter, no conception of language should be provided in advance. In other words, Heidegger’s idea of a dialogue with Japanese philosophy cannot be separated from the “way” of the dialogue itself. Second, considering that historically it is Ueda who engages with Heidegger’s notion of being-in-the-world and language, it is more fitting to place Ueda’s account after first having discussed Heidegger. Nonetheless, the alternative reading that I have suggested above could show more directly why I emphasize the need to distinguish the actual encounter between Heidegger and Tezuka from Heidegger’s philosophical essay, as I use Ueda’s scheme of making sense of poetic language as a way to the bridge between actuality and hollowness; world and the hollow expanse.
References to Heidegger’s Unterwegs zur Sprache (On the Way to Language) (1985) will be abbreviated as US, followed by the page numbers first in the German, then in the English translation separated with a slash.
Heisig clarifies the hermeneutic ground and horizon of that very dialogue, as he writes: “in a sense (…) the “east” that the Kyoto philosophers set up against the “west” they had constructed for themselves was also something of an invention” (2001: 271). Indeed, this would be an invention that constantly interprets “the other” from the standpoint of its “own” self-interpretation whose hermeneutic conditions are already pre-established. Hence, the East-West dialogue today cannot depend only on the so-called “cross-cultural” dialogues, if that solely implies the inter-subjective confrontation of two worlds radically separated from one another, since the boundaries of those worlds are neither well-defined nor fixed.
Some critics indicate that Heidegger’s position concerning the possibility of an East-West conversation is problematic. For instance, Ma argues that according to Heidegger the European languages seem immune to “corruption” (Ma, 2007: 172). What that implies is that it is only the Western logos that is capable of distorting the Eastern spirit, but not the other way around. According to this distorted power dynamic, the latter is represented as weak, passive and receptive, while the former is powerful, transformative and influential. Thus, Heidegger seems to make sense of the intercultural relation at issue as an asymmetric one. However, this is not the only difficulty. Graham Parkes offers the following remarks in his Rising Sun Over Black Forest: “While the documentation that would decide the question appears to be lacking, there is one consideration that militates in favour of the possibility that Heidegger learned of, and was influenced by, the idea of nothingness that was being developed by Nishida during the 1920s—and which would come to assume, in the form of “absolute nothingness”, a central place in the philosophy of the Kyoto School” (May, 1996: 93). Accordingly, if Tanabe Hajime, who was a student in Freiburg at the time to study with Husserl and Heidegger, disseminated Nishida’s ideas in the 1920s, it is possible that initially it was not Heidegger who had an influence on East Asian philosophers, but on the contrary, it was Heidegger who developed key aspects of his philosophy with strong influences from them. After all, as reported by Inaga (2013), Heidegger’s very idea of in-der-Welt-sein (being-in-the-world) may have been a borrowing from Okakuro Kakuzō’s 1906 work The Book of Tea (Cha no hon), a Daoist idea stemming from Zhuangzi. Accordingly, it was Itō Kichinosuke who first gave the book to Heidegger, and it is possible that Heidegger made a free use of that term. For more on this, see Bret Davis’s “Heidegger and Asian Philosophy” (Davis, 2013).
Commentators such as Mizoguchi find the basic underpinnings of Heidegger’s reading disputable (1987: 198). This is important especially considered within the context of the idea of “world philosophies”. What should be the language that determines the core matter of “philosophy”? Morisato’s remarks on this issue are worth noting for opening to discussion different definitions and descriptions of what philosophy is and how the very act of thinking is to be conceived, especially with regard to the Europeanization of “philosophy” by (Morisato, 2019: 23–24).
In view of this, Lin Ma rightfully asks: “What is prima facie bewildering is that, if Heidegger considers that a “sufficient” discussion of East Asian languages is of crucial importance, if he deems that East Asian thought can make important contributions to a thinking beyond traditional metaphysics, if he attaches importance to hearing things in their original tongue, why, instead of taking sufficient initiative to learn a bit more about these languages, for a long stretch of years, he reiterates from time to time his ignorance of the original East Asian languages?” (Ma, 2007: 145).
As Bret Davis remarks (2020: 47), Kida Gen’s idea of “anti-philosophy” (han-tetsugaku), which considers philosophers like Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida in the same league of anti-Platonism, (Kida, 2014: 50–51) is thought-provoking. While this is not necessarily a novel approach, formulating “anti-philosophy” as a negation of “tetsugaku”, which is the literal Japanese translation of the Greek word philosophia as “love of wisdom”, has important implications for what “Japanese philosophy” means.
In the dialogue, the inquirer lets his interlocutor know that “he kept the lecture appearing in print”, hesitating about the fact whether he managed to avoid speaking about language in this lecture (US 139/49), which may be the reason why Hofstadter decided to leave this essay out.
Heidegger specifically underlines this point in italics: “Die Sprache spricht als das Geläut der Stille” (US 27/205).
Kotoh astutely summarizes the role of stillness/silence in Heidegger’s later thought: “It is not logos, but the silence as the “basic mood/voice” (Grundstimme) that encounters the wonder of the presencing of being.” His concluding remarks are worth reconsidering: “One should listen […] belongingly to the sound of silence, which constantly emanates from the depths of the indescribable, and continue to let this be the source of one’s own language” (1987: 211).
Parkes claims that “there is no inherent connection between iki and koto” (1987: 215). Yet he also adds that thinking the meaning of koto as the matter (Sache) of language is what brings out the stillness of iki, while reflecting on the stillness of iki refers us to kotoba itself.
Here I am here referring to Gadamer’s idea of language as die Mitte, which is the middle ground that gathers its interlocutors where a common horizon of understanding emerges for understanding (Gadamer, 1999: 384, 387).
As May shows evidence (1996: 17–18), Heidegger’s real source in identifying this element in Japanese culture is German professor of Japanology, Oscar Benl, specifically his 1952 treaty, Zeami Motokiyo and the Spirit of Nō Drama: Esoteric Aesthetic Writings from the Fifteenth Century.
Heidegger’s emphasis on the stillness of language as the true mood or attunement (Stimmung) and voice (Stimme) of our saying is an important idea, and offers a strong critique of the traditional logocentric notion of language observed in Western metaphysics from Aristotle to Humboldt in various forms. Heidegger’s turn toward stillness as the essence of language is also a turn toward no-thingness as the essence of being. In that context, what Heidegger’s essay establishes is a shift in thinking by moving from phenomenological ontology to hermeneutic meontology, that is, moving from the thinking of being to the thinking the place of non-being, or nothingness. This can be traced back to Heidegger’s famous inaugural address What is Metaphysics (1929), delivered at the University of Freiburg.
In a certain sense, such a conversation involves what Gadamer calls the “fusion of horizons” (1999). If the language of the conversation is the primary language of one of the interlocutors, the speaker of the host language must be ready to appropriately accommodate the other interlocutor, which may mean, being open to be transformed linguistically.
May mentions Michiko Yoneda’s work Gespräch und Dichtung: Ein Auseinandersetzungsversuch der Sprachauffassung Heideggers mit einem japanischen Sagen as a similar approach (May, 1996:14n1).
“The idea of place as tied to a notion of gathering or ‘focus’ is also suggested by the etymology of the German term for place, Ort, according to which the term originally indicated the point or edge of a weapon the point of a spear, for instance —at which all of the energy of the weapon is brought to bear” (Malpas, 2006: 29).
May states that Heidegger’s dialogue can be read as his account of dao as “the Way” (May, 1996: 20), a concept which indeed appears in the later essays of US (187/98).
Davis explains this point as follows: “Zen is not an otherworldly mysticism; it is rather a “non-mysticism” (G. Nicht-Mystik, J. hishinpi-shugi 非神秘主義) or “de-mysticism” that repeatedly passes through and beyond a silent state of unio mystica on the way back to a nondual (that is, “not one and not two”) experience of living in the linguistically articulated world of plurality (Davis, 2019: 717).
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Karamercan, O. Locating Heidegger’s Kotoba between Actuality and Hollowness: the Way towards a Thinking Conversation with Japanese Philosophy. Journal East Asian Philosophy 1, 43–61 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43493-021-00008-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s43493-021-00008-3