Painting by Ahn Gyeon (안견/安堅), Dream Journey to the Peach Blossom Land (몽유도원도/夢遊桃源圖), 1447.

21.11.09

'Being-there': from where?

One of the less well known aspects of Heidegger's life is the controversy over the source of his concept of Dasein, or 'being-there', formulated in his magnum opus Sein und Zeit (1927). 
While most will agree that the first consistent usage of the term can be found in Ludwig Feuerbach, with the meaning of 'existence', the Japanese philosopher Tomonobu Imamichi contends that it was his mentor, Okakura Kakuzo, who introduced the new signification to -- and as espoused by -- Heidegger. 
The story goes like this: in his oeuvre The Book of Tea, Kakuzo addressed the Taoist philosophy of Master Zhuang  or Zhuangzi (子), a Chinese sage from the 4th century BCE.  
In 1919, Kakuzo presented Heidegger with a German translation of his work, wherein a core ontological category of Zhuangzi's thought was 'Westernised' and rendered as das In-der-Welt-Sein, or 'to be in the being of the world'.
Heidegger never said a word on the provenance of Dasein.
Could Dasein be said to have an Eastern inspiration, as a 'parallel' stepping stone on the universal path leading to the holistic Way (道)?

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