Daoist Resonances in Heidegger: Exploring a Forgotten Debt

East Asian imagery resonates throughout Martin Heidegger’s writings. In this exploration of the connections between Daoism and his thought, an international team of scholars consider why the Daodejing and Zhuangzi were texts he returned to repeatedly and the extent Heidegger adhered to Daoism’s core doctrines.

They discuss how Daoist thought provided him with a new perspective, equipping him with images, concepts, and meanings that enabled him to continue his questioning of the nature of being. Exploring the environment, language, death, temporality, aesthetics, and race from the groundlessness of non-being, oneness, and the Way, they illustrate how these themes reverberate with ontological, spiritual, and epistemological potential.

A lesson in the art of Daoist and cross-cultural ways of thinking, this collection marks the first sustained analysis of the influence of classical Daoism on a major 20th-century German philosopher.

David Chai is Associate Professor in the Philosophy Department at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.