Planetary thinking/planetary building

·期刊原文
Planetary thinking/planetary building: An essay on Martin Heidegger and Nishitani Keiji
By Evan Thompson
Philosophy East and West
Volume 36, no. 3
July 1986
P.235-252
(C) by the University of Hawaii Press

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P.235

In The Question of Being, Martin Heidegger writes
that we are

... obliged not to give up the effort to practice
planetary thinking along a stretch of the road, be
it ever so short. Here too no prophetic talents and
demeanor are needed to realize that there are in
store for planetary building encounters for which
participants are by no means equal today. This is
equally true of the European and of the East Asiatic
languages and, above all, for the area of a possible
conversation between them. Neither of the two is
able by itself to open up this area and to establish
it.(1)

What is the practice of planetary thinking? What is
the relation between philosophy and this thinking?

Heidegger's call for planetary thinking occurs
as part of his attempt to read the Western
philosophical tradition as a whole. Although the
truth of philosophy is not dependent on the
historical actuality of the West, philosophy is, for
Heidegger, essentially Western discourse. In What Is
Philosophy?, he writes that

The word philosophia tells us that philosophy is
something which, first of all, determines the
existence of the Greek world. Not only
that--philosophia also determines the innermost
basic feature of our Western-European history. The
often heard expression "Western-European
philosophy", is, in truth, a tautology. Why? Because
philosophy is Greek in its nature; Greek, in this
instance, means that in origin the nature of
philosophy is of such a kind that it first
appropriated the Greek world, and only it, in order
to unfold.(2)

I wish to discuss here the nature of this claim,
especially in its relation to the project of
planetary thinking. We must realize first, however,
that these statements are not an argument for
Western superiority; they are, rather, an attempt to
think the nature of philosophy, the "field" on which
it originates. As Jacques Derrida explains: "It is
simply that the founding concepts of philosophy are
primarily Greek, and it would not be possible to
philosophize, or to speak philosophically, outside
this medium."(3) Heidegger's conception is, then, a
philosophical one: it is a conception of the form or
eidos of a culture and the essential relation of
philosophy to that form.

For Heidegger, metaphysics consists from the
beginning in a determination of Being which he calls
the "ontological difference." Metaphysics
establishes itself by establishing a difference
between beings and Being; metaphysics is this
difference. At the same time, metaphysics does not
think this difference as difference, but looks to
the components of the difference instead. Put
another way, metaphysics does not think Being as
such, immediately conceiving Being within an
opposition instead. Metaphysics comes to understand
Being as the universal ground of all beings, and at
the same time as the ground of itself, the highest
being. This determination of Being (what Heidegger
calls "onto-theology") is an event in the history of
Being, which marks the forgetting of Being.
Metaphysics does not think its own ground; it is the
"oblivion of Being." Heidegger's project of

P.236

thinking Being as such means, then, a dismantling of
the structures metaphysics has erected in order to
reach their ground.(4) His call for a planetary
thinking is inseparable from this project, for if
metaphysics is essentially Western discourse, and if
metaphysics is necessarily oblivious of its own
ground, then the attempt to think this ground
confronts the limits of Western thought.

Heidegger's reading already requires a distance
from or displacement of the Western tradition. One
must not confuse, however, this general displacement
with a stepping out of the tradition, as if this
were simply possible. This displacement comes about
as a displacement of the tradition in the discourse
of the tradition, and so is everywhere
problematical. Philosophy can no longer take itself
for granted; we do not know if the path we tread
leads to the clearing or leaves us lost in the
forest. Heidegger would "step back" from metaphysics
so that its essence (the ontological difference)
could be thought. But what is the nature of this
step? Where can we step when the notion of position
has become suspect?

To be cast adrift from one's moorings is both
liberating and disorienting, and is a condition of
the thinking we are searching for. We sense our
limits and appear to be open for a conversation with
other traditions. Indeed, it is at this point that
we occasionally find an awareness of non-Western
traditions in the writing of philosophy. One thinks
of Heidegger's dialogue with the Japanese(5) and, more
recently, Derrida's comments on phonocentrism and
the Chinese language in his development of the
problematic of writing, in Of Grammatology.(6) These
attempts are a step forward from much of the
provincialism in philosophical writing, and yet they
are everywhere ambiguous: on the one hand, these
discussions displace the narrative in which Western
culture is the final reference point. On the other
hand, we cannot forget that the formulation of this
dispiacement has only come about because of the
assertion of the identity of philosophy and the
discourse of a particular tradition. This
identification is never subjected to criticism and
justified, even in confrontation with other
traditions, but is presented as if it were perfectly
natural (the force of the so-called tautology
"Western-European philosophy"). This identification
rests, furthermore, on the ontological and
epistemological division of "East" and "West," which
is also never questioned; the contours of what
Edward Said calls "imaginative geography" inform
philosophical texts no less than proper
"Orientalist" ones.(7) In the very displacement of
Western culture, at precisely the moment when binary
oppositions were to be questioned, a logic of Same
and Other, centre and margin, is perpetuated in
which the non-Western becomes merely another name
for the margin, the blank space, the Other. The
reification of geographical boundaries not only
impoverishes philosophy, but all of language, for it
makes traditions appear self-enclosed, with no gaps
and passageways among them.

At issue, then, is our understanding of
difference and a logic of same and other. To take
account of difference implies a critical attitude to
our understanding of our own tradition, one which
includes questioning the identification of philo-

P.238

sophy and Western discourse. This claim has, of
course, already been countered on historical and
comparative grounds. Many scholars are concerned
with showing the importance of other traditions in
the development of Western philosophy, and with
comparing philosophies in different cultures.
Although these investigations are essential, they do
not quite reach the problems we face here.
Comparative philosophy does not often reflect on the
problem of its own status, on the nature of
comparative discourse. Of course, these problems are
always present in the practice of translation, but
translation is still largely conceived in a
comparative framework, one not hermeneutically
subtle enough to account for the growing processes
of confrontation, interference, accommodation, and
appropriation among various traditions. The
development of more complicated hermeneutics cannot
rest content with only historical and comparative
analyses, for one of the tasks of comparative
philosophy is, as Henry Corbin puts it (rightly, I
believe, though in a different spirit from the
discussion I will pursue here), "to enquire into the
form, here and there, of time lived, and thus of the
advent of the concept of something like a history,
and so of a history of philosophy."s In our case,
beginning with Heidegger, we must attempt to
understand what the words "West" and "philosophy as
Western discourse" signify philosophically, in texts
that are philosophical; in other words, with how
philosophy understands itself.

Ultimately, of course, none of these problems
can be separated. The hermeneutic activity is always
connected to certain problems and texts, which in
turn are found in particular traditions and
communities. We must begin from where we find
ourselves, from a particular situation or encounter,
but we should not proceed naively, in isolation from
broader, theoretical concerns. We should draw on the
resources of the Heideggerian critique, yet at the
same time not lose sight of the particularities of
the issues we are investigating.

In this spirit I wish to approach the matter of
planetary thinking through the thought of the
Japanese philosopher, Nishitani Keiji. Nishitani is
one of those who might be called the "heirs" of
Heidegger (he studied with Heidegger in Germany in
the 1930s). His philosophical endeavour (and that of
the Kyoto School) is monumental, for it is one of
the few examples of European philosophy being
appropriated by another tradition and being replied
to by that tradition, both thereby becoming part of
a planetary movement. If one of the philosophical
tasks left to us in the late twentieth century is
the appropriation of Heidegger's thought, we would
do well to look to Nishitani, for he shows that
Heidegger's call for planetary thinking has not gone
unheard. I wish here to continue the conversation
between Heidegger and Nishitani and to explore this
meeting of traditions in Nishitani's recently
translated work, Religion and Nothingness.(9) My
conviction, which I hope to make persuasive, is that
Nishitani's presentation and development of a
contemporary philosophy of "emptiness" (`suunyataa)
not only address Heidegger's key concerns, but
provide the space in which dialogue among
civilizations and planetary thinking become
possible.

P.238

In Nishitani's thought we are presented with a
movement from what he calls the "field of
consciousness," to the "field of nihility," to the
"field of emptiness."(10) This movement is both
historical and personal: in it "relative
nothingness" or nihilism is situated as a particular
development of our culture and a stage of individual
transformation. For Nishitani, European thought has
become trapped on the "field of nihility," stopping
short of an understanding of what Buddhists call
"emptiness." Nishitani's challenge to us, though, is
not to adopt Buddhism, but to achieve an
understanding of emptiness working from our own
premises. He recognizes, however, that his own
thought has only come about because of an encounter
with Western thought and history. His discussion of
the relations between emptiness, time, and history
is especially a result of this encounter, for
Nishitani openly admits that Buddhism has not
encountered the problem of the historicity of time
to the extent that it has been encountered in the
West. This meeting of Buddhist and European
traditions around the problem of history is the
starting point for Nishitani's meditations in the
latter part of Religion and Nothingness:

How is it possible for what we call history to carry
its historicity through to its last and final
transhistorical base without thereby being
terminated as history at the hands of the
transhistorical? In other words: How is it possible
for history to become radically historical by virtue
of its historicity being carried through to a
transhistorical ground? (RN, p. 213)

Nishitani follows Toynbee in presenting the
problem. In the Abrahamic religions, historical
consciousness develops as an aspect of God's
relationship with humanity: God establishes a
covenant with a people in the Old Testament; for
Christians, God becomes human in the unique event of
the birth of Christ. Historical processes here
become intrinsically significant; the articulation
of history takes a narrative form as the destiny of
a people, the fall and redemption of humanity, or
the modern narrative of the emancipation of the
subject. For Nishitani, this development of
historical consciousness is a movement beyond a
merely cyclical conception of time found, for
example, in Brahmanical India. What is sacrificed in
such a development, however, is the universal,
impersonal nature of time. Historical time is now
inseparable from a standpoint of person or will; the
development of an historical conception of time goes
hand in hand with the realization of Divinity in a
personal relationship. It becomes increasingly
difficult, however, to mediate this personal
relationship with an impersonal universality; thus
the growth of religious intolerance. In our times,
though, the crisis of religious consciousness has
resulted in a denial of a transcendent Divinity and
the deepening of the nothingness of creation into an
abyss always underfoot (the "field of nihility").
Here the intrinsic significance of history begins to
come apart so that, in the words of Dostoyevsky's
underground man, "anything can be said of world
history, anything conceivable even by the most
disordered imagination."(11) This is the situation
in which Nietzsche also finds us. We have found that
there is no truth, but we continue to seek it: "What
does nihilism

P.239

mean? That the highest values devaluate themselves.
The aim is lacking; 'why' finds no answer."(12)
Nishitani shares Nietzsche's estimation of our
situation: we cannot escape from time, and so must
analyze our desire to escape and find a mode of
being-in-time where time is no longer felt as a
burden. The transition to emptiness, however, does
not mean that we simply turn our backs to
"nihility." We must attempt to enter the heart of
nihilism and open it up to what lies beyond it.

Heidegger confirms this when he writes in The
Question of Being that to overcome nihilism we must
first enter into its essence. For Heidegger, to
enter the essence of nihilism is to "step back"
towards the place where Being and nothingness are
gathered together. In "What is Metaphysics? "
nothingness appears as the totally other of Being,
that which is not any determinate entity.(13) For a
thinking that only knows entities, what Heidegger
calls the "horizon of scientific conception" and
Nishitani the "field of consciousness," Being, that
which is not any being, can only appear as
nothingness. This nothingness is, then, a "relative
nothingness," a qualification that Heidegger also
makes explicit in The Question of Being.(14)
Heidegger questions this nothingness in order to
make problematical, and thus ultimately to
transcend, a thinking bound to the representation of
determinate entities. He interprets Dasein's
projection into nothingness to mean that humanity is
the "place-holder for nothingness"; humanity holds
"the place open for the complete other of beings, so
that in its openness there can be such a thing as
being present (Being) ."(15) Whereas Nishitani
transforms "relative nothingness" into "absolute
nothingness" or emptiness, Heidegger assimilates
nothingness to the possibility of being-present;
absence belongs to presence as one of the
possibilities of Being: "Being and nothingness are
not side by side. One intercedes on behalf of the
other in a relationship, the amplitude of whose
essence we have scarcely considered yet."(16) (I
will have more to say of this difference later.) The
essence of nihilism is, then, not nihilistic: the
essence of nothingness belongs to Being; thus
nihilism, as a determination of Being, belongs to
metaphysics.

Heidegger's call for planetary thinking comes
from this attempt to think the essence of nihilism.
Nihilism now envelops the planet and in this
envelopment it appears as if there are only beings,
that Being is an empty concept. Yet metaphysics
itself is, for Heidegger, the oblivion or
concealment of Being, for metaphysics never thinks
Being as such. The withdrawal of Being in nihilism,
and hence the collapse of the ontological difference
between Being and beings, is already at work in
metaphysics; it is inherent in the grasping of the
difference by way of its components. Our sight is
fixed on what differs, and we remain blind to
difference as such.(17) The overcoming of nihilism
is based on understanding metaphysics as the
"oblivion of Being." The "step back" would think
this oblivion, and so enter the heart of nihilism.
For Heidegger, metaphysics can never come to a
realization of the oblivion of Being in the
ontological difference, for metaphysics is founded
upon it. Thus, the question of Being "dies off, if
it does

P.240

not surrender the language of metaphysics, because
metaphysical conception forbids thinking the
question as to the essence of being" (italics in
original).(18) The attempt to think the ontological
difference as difference is, then, to move out of
metaphysics. Such a move cannot be made by a series
of propositions or chain of reasons, for reason is
essentially metaphysical. For Heidegger, one must
rather leap out of metaphysics, a leap he would
accomplish by the "step back."

The "step back" is not an historical one; one
does not attempt to return to a supposed
premetaphysical thinking. The "step back" is a step
away from metaphysical thinking towards its ground,
so that the essence of metaphysics, the ontological
difference, can be thought. One attempts to move
from the oblivion of the difference to a field where
Being can be thought nonrepresentationally.

...we must first assume a proper position face to
face with the difference. Such a confrontation
becomes manifest to us once we accomplish the step
back. Only as this step gains for us greater
distance does what is near give itself as such, does
nearness achieve its first radiance. By the step
back, we set the matter of thinking, Being as
difference, free to enter a position face to face,
which may well remain wholly without an object.(19)

The "step back" would move away from the vestiges of
representation on the "field of nihility" to
experience what Heidegger calls the "belonging
together" of humanity and Being in the Same. The
Same is not the merely identical free of difference;
the Same preserves difference, implying a process of
mediation or unification. This unification, however,
is not one in which humanity and Being exist
separately and then somehow happen to meet. Their
relationship is not one of a necessary connection, a
systematic encounter between terms that are
metaphysically grounded. Instead of determining
belonging by together, the unity of a manifold,
together is determined by belonging, by identity in
movement, a process of appropriation: Dasein, as
that being who exists, that is, who stands out from
beings into the present of Being, is appropriated to
Being. Being, as presence, needs the openness of
Dasein, its "place-holder," to arrive as presence.

... a spring is needed in order to experience
authentically the belonging together of man and
Being. This spring is the abruptness of the
unbridged entry into that which alone can grant a
toward-each-other of man and Being, and thus the
constellation of the two. The spring is the abrupt
entry into the realm from which man and Being have
already reached each other in their active nature,
since both are mutually appropriated, extended as a
gift, one to the other. Only the entry into the
realm of this mutual appropriation determines and
defines the experience of thinking.(20)

Nishitani shares Heidegger's attempt to move out
of metaphysics to a new way of thinking. In Religion
and Nothingness, he also confronts the problem of
identity, here in its relation to the mode of being
in emptiness. Traditionally, metaphysics understands
identity as a characteristic of the Being of beings:
an entity is said to be the same with itself, and
this sameness is variously articulated as idea,
form, substance, and so forth. Inherent in this
conception is the separation of actual from
essential being and the attempt to approach the
former by

P.241

way of the latter. To discover that something is
metaphysics asks what it is. This separation is, of
course, the ontological difference: "Being is
divided into whatness and thatness. The history of
Being as metaphysics begins with this distinction
and its preparation. Metaphysics includes the
distinction in the structure of truth about beings
as such as a whole."(21) For Nishitani, emptiness is
the complete negation of metaphysical identity and
"a conversion of the standpoint of reason and all
its logical thinking" (RN, p. 117).

The standpoint of emptiness comes about as a
negation of "nihility," not in order to assert the
priority of beings, but as a realization of the
nonduality of being and nothingness. "Relative
nothingness" becomes "absolute nothingness," for
nothingness appears at the heart of self-identity.
Here the self-identity of an entity is shown to be
its nonself-nature; thus Nishitani abandons the term
"nothingness" and takes up "`suunyataa" or
"emptiness." The mode of being and thinking on the
"field of emptiness" Nishitani finds expressed in
the ancient Zen phrases: "Fire does not burn fire,"
"water does not wet water," "the eye does not see
the eye." Here the essential being of fire, for
example, is expressed by saying that it does not
burn itself; actual being, on the other hand, is
expressed simultaneously by saying that fire burns.
The essence or self-nature of fire occurs at
precisely the point where it does not burn, that is,
is not itself; this point of nonself-identity,
however, is inseparable from the actual process of
combustion. Nishitani writes:

If we suppose that the natural, essential quality
(physis) --or, in Buddhist terms,
"self-nature"--resides in the power and work of
combustion, then the selfness of fire resides at the
point of its so-called non-self-nature. In contrast
to the notion of substance which comprehends the
selfness of fire in its fire-nature (and thus as
being) , the true selfness of fire is its
non-fire-nature. The selfness of fire lies in
non-combustion. Of course, this non-combustion is
not something apart from combustion; fire is
non-combustive in its very act of combustion. It
does not burn itself. To withdraw the non-combustion
of fire from the discussion is to make combustion in
truth unthinkable. That a fire sustains itself while
it is in the act of burning means precisely that it
does not burn itself.... The non-self-nature of fire
is its home-ground of being. (RN, p. 117)

Here actual and essential being cannot be presented
separately. This is not to say, however, that the
two are simply identical, which would be the
monistic extreme. Emptiness is the negation of an
inherent being in things, and thus expresses the
true condition of phenomena. But as a lack or
negation, emptiness is not separate from phenomena;
it is not a ground, substance, or essence behind or
within things. Emptiness, then, cannot be understood
simply in terms of the ontological difference; "the
way things are" is not operative within such a
division. The nonduality of form and emptiness, or
actual and essential being, means that being is
illusory at its ground, that everything is illusory
appearance. Yet it is not some thing or being that
appears, it is appearance itself with nothing behind
or beneath it. The traditional Buddhist example for
such a mode of appearance is that of the magician
who fabricates the illusion of a horse or some other
animal.

P.242

Although there never was any animal there, the
appearance nevertheless arises, As Nishitani puts
it: "... appearance is illusory at the elemental
level in its very reality, and real in its very
illusoriness" (RN, p. 129). This mode of being is
thus knowable, but not as the representation of an
object by a subject; in Nishitani's words, emptiness
is experienced as a "non-cognitive knowing of the
non-objective thing-in-itself" (RN, p. 139).

The transition from "nihility" to emptiness also
involves a transformation of our understanding of
time. On the "field of nihility," the recognition of
the "infinite openness" of time results in an
understanding of time as infinitely extended without
beginning or end. Dasein, being-in-the-world, is the
living of this time; Dasein does not live in time,
but lives time, In the living of time as infinite
extension, Dasein loses its purely human
determination, for it is dispersed along the endless
pathways of spatial and temporal relations and
revealed as sheer being-in-the-world,
being-in-the-world as such. The origin or ground of
time cannot be found, then, by searching ever
backwards or ever forwards, for the ordinary, linear
conception of time has been displaced by infinite
dispersion. This dispersion, however, is being
continually constituted each "moment," and it is
there that the origin of time is to be sought.

On the "field of emptiness, " the infinite
openness of time becomes an ecstatic field of
transcendence at each moment, a field where the self
is ecstatically outside of time. Here the intrinsic
reality of being-in-the-world is negated, but this
negation is not a denial of our actual
being-in-the-world, for the latter can only come
about if it is free of intrinsic determinations.
From the perspective of the "field of nihility," the
"field of emptiness" transcends being-in-time;
Dasein appears as not-being-in-time. On the "field
of emptiness," however, the "field of nihility is
reappropriated so that transcendence occurs as a
revaluation of being-in-time, a living of time where
the debt of existence is realized as the Bodhisattva
vow, which is responsible to all beings and takes on
their suffering. The nonduality of form and
emptiness here shows itself as the nonduality of
time and eternity. Time cannot be circumscribed by
an inside and outside; the tracing of boundaries is
always relative, situated in a particular universe.

Nishitani distinguishes several levels of
understanding time: when being-in-time manifests as
being-at-doing (sa.msk.rta), time becomes a field of
infinite becoming without beginning or end, an
endless continuum of moments, each new and
impermanent. The realization of"nihility," however,
opens up an abyss at the bottom of each moment, so
that the beginning and end of time are to be found
in an ecstatic field "beneath" the present. Time
takes on a cyclic form, while "nihility" appears as
eternity, a transcendent field from which the world,
grasped as the totality of what is, is perpetually
slipping away. For Nishitani, either of these
aspects, considered in isolation, robs time of its
full historicity: irreversibility in isolation
leaves us with religious eschatology or the secular
myth of progress, both ultimately tied to will and
egocentrism, and thus intolerant.

P.243

Cyclic time destroys novelty and creativity, for the
beginning and end of time become one in the
nothingness "beneath" each moment. Even so radical
an understanding as Nietzsche's eternal return,
Nishitani argues, errs in the extreme of sacrificing
the individual to the universal. Nietzsche
recognizes that the will is not a faculty of an
intrinsically real subject, that we "foist" the
grammatical category of subject on an impersonal
process of figuration (the will to power), but he is
unable to retain what Buddhism calls the
"conventional self." On the "field of emptiness,"
however, linear and cyclic time are reconciled and
revaluated. The emptiness of time means that time
can function irreversibly, but the awareness of an
openness at the ground of each moment means that the
beginning and end of time can always be found now,
in the dependent-origination of the present moment.
In this sense, the past, present, and future are all
simultaneous: linear and cyclic time become
"circuminsessional" time. This simul aneity allows
us, in Nishitani's words, to "encounter `Saakyamuni
and Jesus, Basho and Beethoven in the present" (RN,
p. 1 61). This encounter is not an empathetic one of
subjects, as in nineteenth-century hermeneutics, for
here we are located on a field of selflessness. The
Buddhist actively realizes(22) Buddha in the
Bodhisattva vow; Basho's frog again becomes an
occasion for poetry in the writing of Sengai.(23)

The displacement of the division of actual and
essential being on the "field of emptiness" results
in a nonegocentric mode of being-in-time. We find a
similar displacement in Heidegger's later thought,
for just as Nishitani reappropriates "nihility" in
emptiness, so for Heidegger nihilism becomes a
"moment" in the history of Being, one of the ways
Being is, as he puts it, "sent" in history.

Already in The Question of Being, Heidegger
reads the "concealment of Being" in both senses of
the double genitive: Being is concealed, but this
concealment also belongs to Being. He writes that
the oblivion of Being can be seen "as a concealment,
presumably a sheltering which still preserves what
has not yet been revealed."(24) Concealment is
thought as veiling--in Greek, lethe, what remains
concealed in unconcealment: a-letheia.(25) The
history of Being is now thought in its epochs, from
the Greek epoche, a holding back. This holding back
Heidegger sees as the fundamental characteristic of
the history of Being as "sending." His understanding
of this "sending" is important, especially for our
comparison with Nishitani, for it effects a
displacement of the concept of the ontological
difference. Heidegger turns to the German idiom "es
gibt" and the French "il y a," and sees Being as a
"gift" that is sent in history; the "It" that gives,
however, is veiled, concealed. The gift instead
becomes thought by way of the ontological
difference: a gift of Being that secures.
establishes, maintains beings. In its very giving of
the gift, the "It" and giving hold back, conceal
themselves. In "Time and Being," Heidegger writes:

A giving which gives only its gift, but in the
giving holds itself back and withdraws, such a
giving we call a sending. According to the meaning
of giving which is to be thought in this way,
Being--that which It gives--is what is sent.

P.244

Each of its transformations remains destined in this
manner, What is historical in the history of Being
is determined by what is sent forth in destining,
not by any indeterminately thought up
occurrence.(26)

The "step back," then, would think this giving that
remains veiled in the gift of Being, releasing the
ontological difference to the more originary play of
giving: Being "overwhelms" beings, is given to
beings as a gift; beings, on the other hand, receive
Being and in their reception sustain Being in its
overwhelming. Being's overwhelming of beings allows
beings to arrive and be present. The arrival of
beings, however, keeps itself concealed in the
unconcealedness of Being. Pierre Livet uses the
analogy of an archer aiming at a target to explain
this overshelming and arrival.(27) The tension of
the bow is the fundamental energy that moves the
arrow. The direction of the arrow is determined by
the archer who aims the bow, but one can also
consider the direction of the arrow to be guided by
the target that will receive the arrow. By analogy,
the tension of the bow is the "It gives," the energy
by which Being is sent. The movement of the arrow to
the target is the movement of Being to beings,
determined not only by the sending, but by beings,
the target or destination of the sending (Geschick),
This analogy shows how Heidegger conceives the
relation of Being to beings as the unity of an
event: bow, arrow, target, and archer all come
together as an event, and in this event there is no
question of grounding the movement in a final,
determining factor. The relation of Being to beings
becomes a back-and-forth movement of overwhelming
and arrival, unconcealment and concealing:

The difference of Being and beings, as the
differentiation of overwhelming and arrival, is the
perdurance (Austraq) of the two in unconcealing
keeping in concealment. Within this perdurance there
prevails a clearing of what veils and closes itself
off--and this its perdurance bestows the being
apart, and the being toward each other, of
overwhelming and arrival.(28)

The sending of Being as unconcealment points to
an intimacy of time and being. Being is not any
being in time, yet Being as unconcealment or
presence is determined by time. Time, however, is
also determined by Being: time passes away, but its
passing away is constant; it endures, presences,
Being is not any being, and time is not any thing in
time; Being and time, as presence, determine each
other reciprocally. In metaphysics, however, Being
as presence is forgotten: Being is conceived as
ground for and the highest of present beings. In the
same way, the presence of time is conceived by way
of the present moment, the now. Yet for Heidegger,
the presencing of time cannot be determined by the
present as moment. As we saw, Heidegger assimilates
nothingness to Being as a mode of being-present; in
the same way, he sees absence (the no-longer-now and
the not-yet-now) as a "manner of presencing and
approaching."(29) In the past, presencing is
extended, whereas in the future, presencing is
offered. In a passage similar to one of Nishitani,
Heidegger writes:

Approaching, being not yet present, at the same
time gives and brings about what is no longer
present, the past, and conversely what has been
offers future to

P.245

itself. The reciprocal relation of both at the same
time gives and brings about the present. We say "at
the same time," and thus ascribe a time character to
the mutual giving to one another of a future, past,
and present, that is, to their own unity.(30)

In the next paragraph, however, Heidegger qualifies
this mutual giving" so that it can no longer be said
"that future, past and present are before us 'at the
same time'." What Nishitani calls the
"non-self-nature" of time, Heidegger expresses by
writing that the "mutual giving" of time is nothing
temporal: past, present, and future offer each other
the presencing that is given in them. It is this
presencing, for Heidegger, that opens up what he
calls "time-space": the "mutual giving" of past,
present, and future opens a region in which what we
know as space occurs.

The reciprocal determination of past, present,
and future, and the space it opens up is, for
Heidegger, the "dimensionality" of time. Dimension
here does not mean an area of measurement, but the
opening up of time-space, in which the threefold
giving of time shows the three dimensions of time.
But Heidegger also writes of a fourth dimension of
time, one he calls "nearhood" (Nahheit). "Near-hood"
is the first, primal giving that allows each moment
of time its own presencing, holding the moments both
apart and towards each other:

... it brings future, past and present near to one
another by distancing them. For it keeps what has
been open by denying its advent as present. This
nearing of nearness keeps open the approach coming
from the future by withholding the present in the
approach, nearing nearness has the character of
denial and withholding. It unifies in advance the
ways in which what has-been, what is about to be,
and the present reach out toward each other.(31)

Time, like Being, is then a gift of a giving that
opens and conceals.

The sending of Being as presence and the opening
of time, their active identity as an event,
Heidegger calls Ereignis, the "event of
appropriation." We have already seen Ereignis in the
form of the mutual appropriation of humanity and
Being, their belonging together. Being and humanity,
in the reciprocity of their movement, come to
presence each in its own way; in their appropriate
coming to presence, each is delivered to the other.
Heidegger plays on the relation of Ereignen to
Eraugnen, "to place before the eyes" or "to show,"
both suggesting a "coming into the light."(32) The
belonging together of humanity and Being can also be
seen, then, as the process by which the "clearing"
(Lichtung) occurs, which grants both Being and time.
As gifts of appropriation, Being and time both
vanish in Ereignis, a play both active and passive
in which even the "It" of "It gives" would remain a
representation. The opening and concealing of Being
and time belong to the "event of appropriation":
Ereignis appropriates and expropriates.

Insofar as the destiny of Being lies in the
extending of time, and time, together with Being,
lies in Appropriation, Appropriating makes manifest
its peculiar property, that Appropriation withdraws
what is most fully its own from bound-

P.246

less unconcealment. Thought in terms of
Appropriating, this means: in that sense it
expropriates itself of itself, Expropriation belongs
to Appropriation as such. By this expropriation,
Appropriation does not abandon itself--rather it
preserves what is its own.(33)

For Nishitani, the realization of "nihility"
prefigures the transition to emptiness; for
Heidegger, we are given a prelude to the "event of
appropriation" in the relation of humanity and
technology. What Heidegger calls the "framework"
(Ge-stell) is the confrontation, the "mutual
challenging, " of humanity and Being in the
technological age. The "framework" might be called
the "configuration" of this epoch of Being that is
our own age: everywhere beings are determined as
what is calculable, capable of being quantified and
manipulated. The "framework," however, is never
anywhere present as an entity; it is not subject to
the determination it enforces, and so remains
unthought. Yet it expresses the manner in which the
belonging together of humanity and Being is
determined in our age: Being withdraws in favour of
the calculable being, while humanity unceasingly
strives to bring all entities under its control.
Perhaps, in what seems to be the furthest withdrawal
of Being, a strange transition is announced.

What we experience in the frame as the constellation
of Being and man through the modern world of
technology is a prelude to what is called the event
of appropriation. This event, however, does not
necessarily persist in its prelude. For in the event
of appropriation the possibility arises that it may
overcome the mere dominance of the frame to turn it
into a more original appropriating. Such a
transformation of the frame into the event of
appropriation, by virtue of that event, would bring
the appropriate recovery--appropriate, hence never to
be produced by man alone--of the world of technology
from its dominance back to servitude in the realm by
which man reaches more fully into the event of
appropriation.(34)

The course that I have charted so far through
the texts of Heidegger and Nishitani has revealed
what might be called "family resemblances" of
thought. In both philosophers, we are presented with
a movement, which I will call one of transcendence.
My choice of this word is, perhaps, infelicitous,
for it is a word of many meanings whose confusion
Meidegger sees as "the distinguishing characteristic
of metaphysical conceptions still customary
today."(35) Transcendence is essential to the
ontological difference: it is the movement from
beings to Being; from what Heidegger calls
"changeable being" to a "being in repose"; it is
also the title for the highest being, the
onto-theological determination of Being.(36) In
Heidegger's early writings, however, transcendence
becomes the "surpassing" essential to Dasein, the
ground phenomenon of Dasein's freedom.(37)

Man's Da-sein can only relate to what-is by
projecting into Nothing. Going beyond what-is is of
the essence of Da-sein. But this "going beyond" is
metaphysics itself. That is why metaphysics belongs
to the nature of man.... Metaphysics is the ground
phenomenon of Da-sein. It is Da-sein itself.(38)

In Heidegger's later thought, metaphysics is called
the "fate of transcendence": "Transcendence is
metaphysics itself, whereby this name does not
signify

P.247

a doctrine and discipline of philosophy but
signifies that `it' `gives' that transcendence."(39)

It is precisely this understanding of
transcendence that establishes a conversation among
Asia, Europe, and Greece--here among Buddhism,
Nishitani, and Heidegger. The philosophical
narrative of Nishitani's writing is formed by this
movement of surpassing: on the "field of nihility"
transcendence as constitutive of Dasein is first
grasped--Dasein's freedom is grounded in perpetual
surpassing to the world as being-in-the-world. On
the "field of emptiness," Dasein is revealed as
not-being-in-the-world; Dasein has attained the
"other shore": "`Gate, gate, paragate, parasamgate,
bodhi, svaha!' (O Bodhi, gone, gone, gone to the
other shore, landed at the other shore, Svaha! )
."(40) Yet this "other shore" is what Nishitani
calls an "absolutely near side": Dasein's surpassing
of the world occurs simultaneously as the most
thorough being-in-the-world. If such a movement of
thought, this movement of transcendence, is common
to Greco-European philosophy and Buddhist philosophy
(to say nothing of other Asian philosophical
traditions), then Heidegger's equation of philosophy
with Western discourse cannot be admitted, even in
his own understanding of the statement. This
identification was meant to prevent the imposition
of our thought on other traditions, but it
reinforces the perception of the "East" as an
ineffable Other. Heidegger's effort to achieve a
conversation is monumental, but the plurality of the
planet's traditions cannot be accommodated by the
simplistic opposition of "East" and "West," or in a
reductive logic of Same and Other. We must move to a
logic that is plural, in which we are aware of our
criteria for sameness, difference, for what
constitutes a universe of discourse. Such a
pluralism should not be uncritical, and cannot be
built on ignorance; we can only open ourselves to
the traditions of the world, however, if we do not a
priori consider ourselves to be the only bearers of
a certain thought.

Before closing, I wish to investigate some of
the differences between Heidegger and Nishitani, and
the various directions that their thought might take
us in our task of planetary thinking. My suggestions
are meant to be tentative, to further a conversation
that is only beginning.

I have remarked several times that whereas
Nishitani transforms "relative nothingness" into
emptiness, Heidegger assimilates nothingness to
Being, absence to presence. Yet the matter is not
quite so simply put. At issue is how we understand
the opposition presence/absence, how we see it
function. In Ereignis, Being as presence is given as
a gift, but the giving conceals itself, and so
remains absent. The forgetting of Being is not a
human lapse of memory; it is the necessary lack or
concealment of the clearing in the granting of Being
as uncon-cealment (the lethe of aletheia). What
comes to presence is also a lack. In a late
prose-poem, "The Lack of Sacred Names," Heidegger
writes:

To speak poetically--that means here: to let say to
itself the pure call of coming to presence as such,
even if this be only and precisely a coming to
presence of a removal and of a withholding.(41)

P.248

It is this lack that we never experience; instead of
experiencing coming to presence as the
self-concealing openness of the clearing, we
experience presence as the present. Heidegger's
thoughts on this lack are some of his most wavering,
or, as Derrida would put it, his most "undecidable."
On the one hand, the opposition of presence and
absence is surpassed in Ereignis expropriating
itself of itself. Here "presence" and "absence"
could only be determined by arresting the movement
of Ereignis, in an attempt to determine its
"moments, " but that would be like trying to
determine exactly at what point a dancer's weight
has fully shifted from one foot to another. On the
other hand, Heidegger always refers absence back to
presence, lethe to aletheia; thus the possibility
remains that the self-concealing clearing is an
ineffable presence: "If this were so [that lethe
belongs to aletheial], then the opening would not be
the mere opening of presence, but the opening of
presence concealing itself, the opening of a
sele-concealing sheltering."(42) On the "field of
emptiness," however, the assimilation of absence to
presence can only appear as a symptom of not having
realized nonduality, of not freeing oneself fully
from grasping things by way of the ontological
difference. To the extent that either presence or
absence is made ultimate, one remains caught in
representational thinking. Emptiness is not an
ineffable presence: it is the absence of inherent
being and simultaneously the presence of form. "Form
is emptiness, and emptiness is form." To speak of
absence coming to presence as absence is subtly to
reify absence, for presence and absence are
themselves empty. It is this nonduality of form and
emptiness that allows for Nishitani's
"circuminsessional" time. Heidegger comes close to
this understanding when he writes of the "mutual
giving" of time, but this giving always remains one
of presence. Heidegger insists that the presencing
that opens time-space cannot be conceived on the
basis of the present, the now, and yet he never
returns to the conventional moment; our everyday
conception of time remains derivative from a more
profound understanding. For Nishitani, though, the
"mutual giving" of time is one of emptiness, and,
because of the nonduality of form and emptiness, he
is able to return to the everyday form of time as
the succession of moments.

Heidegger's and Nishitani's
meditations both call for a thinking that surpasses
reason, For Heidegger, reason cannot think the lack
or holding back of Being, for reason is
metaphysical: instead of thinking Being, metaphysics
establishes a reasoned hierarchy between Being and
entities, in which the former is ground for the
latter. For Nishitani, reason operates within the
separation of actual and essential being, and thus
"does not enter directly and immediately to the
point where something is. It does not put one
directly in touch with the home-ground of a thing,
with the thing itself" (RN, pp. 114-115). Nishitani
interprets philosophy as theoria, an intellectual or
contemplative beholding of reality that does not
overcome the division of self and world, Religion,
however, enquires after reality in such a way that
reality is realized in the questioning. Nishitani
bypasses a subjectivistic understanding of religion,
but preserves the self in an identity

P.249

of process: religion is the "self-awareness of
reality," in which "our ability to perceive reality
means that reality realizes (actualizes) itself in
us;... this in turn is the only way that we can
realize (appropriate through understanding) the fact
that reality is so realizing itself in us; and that
in so doing the self-realization of reality takes
place" (RN, p. 5). This division between religion
and philosophy in Nishitani's writing seems to be
inherited from European existentialist thinking in
its response to the erosion of religious belief and
the predominance of science. Heidegger, in a similar
way, always understands science to be technical
thinking, whereas philosophy and poetry confront the
fundamental matters of Being and language. These
separations, however, recapitulate the division of
actual and essential being: on the one hand, we have
an ontic thinking, concerned with entities; on the
other hand, a thinking of essential matters. The
distinctions Heidegger and Nishitani draw in the
realm of thought, then, reinforce the divisions to be
overcome. An effect of these separations can be seen
in Nishitani's occasional statements that ultimate
reality can only be presented as paradox:

When we persist in our pursuit of what is truly,
true, among the things that are true, the truly true
appears in the mode of paradox or absurdity, under
the conditions ordinarily considered as altogether
contradictory to truth. Where ratio is pushed to its
limits the "irrational" shows up. Where meaning is
pushed to its extreme, "meaninglessness" shows up.
And yet what thus appears as paradox, irrationality,
or meaninglessness, is truly absolute reality. (RN,
p. 180)

But if emptiness is nondual, then how can it be so
easily aligned with the simple opposites of reason
and meaning? The "irrational" does not seem to be
the emptiness of reason, but reason's flip side,
which appears in the movement from the "field of
consciousness" to "nihility." If one holds that
reason is inadequate to convey ultimate reality,
then one must hold paradox to be inadequate as well;
if ultimate reality is ultimately inconceivable,
then it must escape any attempt to capture it,
reasoned and paradoxical. On the other hand, if the
"field of emptiness" is an "absolutely near side,"
then we must be led to an appreciation of reason in
its role of guiding us in the everyday world.

Nishitani does not always remain within the
separation of meaning and paradox. He tells us that
the Japanese word "kokoro" can mean both "meaning"
and "mind"; thus to understand meaning is to obtain
the mind of a given matter ("koto"). Understanding
is a reciprocal transmission of minds, "wherein a
koto takes possession of us and transfers into us,
even as we in turn really transfer over into the
koto so that our mind becomes and works as the koto"
(RN, p. 179). In this back-and-forth movement,
"meaning" is an abstraction, for it arrests the
process and attempts an ideal correlation of
thought, meaning, and matter. In Mahaayaana Buddhist
literature, such as the Vimalakiirti Suutra,
ultimate reality is said to be inconceivable for the
grasping mind, that is, for the mind that constructs
realities out of concepts and then clings to these
reifications. On the "field of emptiness," one
tolerates the impossibility of grasping things as
they really are: as Robert Thurman puts it, "the
grasping mind cannot grasp its

P.250

ultimate inability to grasp; it can only cultivate
its tolerance of that inability."(43) In the
Praj~naapaaramitaa Suutras, emptiness is said to be
empty even of itself: emptiness is the lack of
svabhaava (intrinsic reality), but this lack does
not itself have an intrinsically real status. This
understanding is said to prevent the two extremes of
reification and repudiation (nihilism): emptiness is
not intrinsically real, but it is not a denial of
conventional things, for it is the
dependent-origination of form. Thus, as Nishitani
tells us, the realization of "mind-meaning" is not
an act of grasping or discerning; it is what he
calls "a discernment of non-discernment" (RN, p.
182).

Planetary thinking requires such a middle way,
one that does not sacrifice identity to difference,
or reduce difference to identity. Instead of trying
to merge many traditions into one, or resting
content with tolerant isolation, we must attempt to
create the spaces in which traditions can interfere
and call forth modifications in each other. I say
"spaces" in the plural, for space and tradition are
interdependent; neither one is ultimately situated
in the other. The encounter among traditions should
not be dogmatically combative, but we should not
exclude critical confrontation, that is,
confrontation aimed at furthering the conversation,
not drowning out the voices of others. Agonistics is
not necessarily intolerant (as many proponents of
religious dialogue seem to think), for it can be a
strategy for furthering a conversation.

What unites us in conversation here is the
attempt to think in a planetary context, and so to
build and dwell in a planetary world. Heidegger
tells us in "Building Dwelling Thinking" that the
"nature of building is letting dwell. Building
accomplishes its nature in the raising of locations
and the joining of their spaces. Only if we are
capable of dwelling, only then can we build"
(italics in original).(44) Heidegger writes that a
bridge gathers a landscape together; in creating a
passage, it sets off the banks of a river and does
not merely connect what was already there. A bridge
determines a space, and space is the openness that
permits us to build; in his words, "building... is a
founding and joining of spaces."(45) The joining of
spaces is not their unification, but, to borrow an
image from Michel Serres, the negotiation of
passages among them. A passage is created by
movement, and, in movement, passage and traverser
are inseparable. Planetary thinking must search for
pathways among traditions, must attempt to join the
spaces that make up our world. Such a journey not
only alters our imaginative geography" to the
contours of the landscape, but produces new spaces
and terrain, places we have not dwelt in before.

NOTES

1. Martin Heidegger, The Question of Being,
trans. William Kluback and Jean T. Wilde (New Haven,
Connecticut: College and University Press, 1958), p.
107.

2. Martin Heidegger, What Is Philosophy? trans.
William Kluback and Jean T. Wilde (New Haven,
Connecticut: College and University Press), pp.
29-31.

P.251

3. Jacques Derrida, "Violence and Metaphysics,"
in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass
(Chicago, Illinois: The University Press of Chicago,
1978), p. 81.

4. See Heidegger, What Is Philosophy? pp. 71-73.

5. Martin Heidegger, "A Dialogue on Language,"
in On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz
(New York: Harper and Row, 1971).

6. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, Maryland: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), pp. 25-26,
90-91.

7. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage
Books, 1978), pp. 49-73.

8. Henry Corbin, The Concept of Comparative
Philosophy, trans. Peter Russell (Ipswich, England:
Golgonooza Press, 1981), p. 4.

9. Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness,
trans. Jan Van Bragt (Berkeley, California:
University of California Press, 1982); hereafter
referred to in the text as RN.

10. The "field of consciousness" refers to the
separation of self and world where the latter is
understood as a field of objectivity for a subject,
the former. "Nihility" is the term Bragt coins for
"relative nothingness," the nothingness of nihilism
and existentialism, in contrast to "absolute
nothingness" or "emptiness."

11. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes From Underground;
The Double, trans. Jessie Coulson (London: Penguin
Books Ltd., 1972), p. 37.

12. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power,
trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, ed.
Waiter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), p.
9.

13. Martin Heidegger, "What Is Metaphysics?" in
Existence and Being (South Bend, Indiana: Gateway
Editions, 1949).

14. Heidegger, The Question of Being, p. 97.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid.

17. See Martin Heidegger, Identity and
Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper
and Row, 1969), p. 70.

18. Heidegger, The Question of Being, p. 73.

19. Heidegger, Identity and Difference, p. 64.

20. Ibid., p. 33.

21. Martin Heidegger, The End of Philosophy,
trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row,
1973), pp. 2-3.

22. Nishitani uses "realize" in the double sense
of "to actualize" and "to appropriate through
understanding." See RN, pp. 5-6.

23. See World of the Buddha: A Reader, ed.
Lucien Stryk (New York: Anchor Books, 1969), p. 356.

24. Heidegger, The Question of Being, p. 89.

25. Cf. Heidegger, Identity and Difference, pp.
50-51.

26. Martin Heidegger, On Time and Being, trans.
Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), pp.
8-9.

27. Pierre Livet, "Interference entre
civilisations ou dialogue autoreferent: l'ambiguite
heideggerienne, " in Les Etudes Philosophiques:
Philosophies Orientales et Extreme Orientales,
Octobre-Decembre, 1983 (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France) , pp. 477-478.

28. Heidegger, Identity, and Difference, p. 65.

29. Heidegger, On Time and Being, p. 13.

30. Ibid., pp. 13-14.

31. Ibid., p. 15.

32. See Albert Hofstadter's introduction to his
translation of Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language,
Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), pp.
xviii-xxii.

33. Heidegger, On Time and Being, pp. 22-23.

34. Heidegger, Identity and Difference, pp. 36-37.

35. Heidegger, The Question of Being, p. 57.

36. Ibid.

37. See Martin Heidegger, The Essence of
Reasons, trans. Terrence Malick (Evansville,
Illinois: Northwestern University Press).

38. Heidegger, "What is Metaphysics?" p. 348.
39. Heidegger, The Question of Being, p. 87.

P.252

40. "The Praj~naparamita-hridaya sutra," in D.
T. Suzuki, Manual of Zen Buddhism (New York: Grove
Press, 1960), p. 27.

41. Martin Heidegger, "Der Fehl heiliger Namen,"
Contre Toute Attente, 2-3, Printemps-Ete, 1981;
English translation, "The Lack of Sacred Names," by
Thomas Pepper (unpublished manuscript). I wish to
thank Thomas Pepper for making this manuscript
available to me, and for many conversations that
have aided me greatly in writing this essay.

42. Heidegger, On Time and Being, p. 71.

43. Robert A. F. Thurman, trans., The Holy
Teaching of Vimalakiirti (Philadelphia, Penn.:
Pennsylvania University Press, 1976), p. 161.

44. Heidegger, "Building Dwelling Thinking," in
Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 160.

45. Ibid., p. 158.