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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ Wehry (00:03.618)
Hello and welcome to Chasing the Viathan. I'm your host, PJ Weary, and I'm here today with Dr. Eric Nelson, professor of philosophy at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. And we're here to talk about his book, Heidegger and Dao, Things, Nothingness, Freedom. Dr. Nelson, Eric, wonderful to have you on today.
Eric Nelson (00:24.46)
It's wonderful to be here, PJ. Thanks for inviting me.
PJ Wehry (00:29.346)
So, Eric, tell me, why this book?
Eric Nelson (00:34.968)
So I'm always interested in certain topics and exploring them further, especially if other scholars are not doing it. So for example, all of my books have been on topics that I think are important and have been underexplored by others or not in the way that I would want them to be done. And so my book is very different than the previous books on this topic. There's been lot of literature. There's maybe four books, five or so, a few accountantologies and a lot of articles. So there's a lot of ink spilt on this topic.
But in my case, I'm doing something slightly different. One is I'm doing it more in an intellectual history, historical kind of way. So this means that I'm looking at the historical sources that Heidegger is drawing on, the context, the different interpretations. So this makes the book a little bit more happier than some of the other books that are more poetic and more enthusiastic about the topic. But often they have not only an historical character, they're mythologizing. They have a very mytholog...
mythologizing orientalistic view of Taoism. And they're sort of naive about the relation of Heidegger and Taoism. And this is why there's a lot of skepticism about the topic as well. So certain Heidegger scholars in particular, not only Eurocentric ones or racist ones, but ones who are just skeptical of the topic say, this is exaggerated. You have this really kind of fantastic view of Taoism and its influence in Heidegger. can't be real. But then I look at the skeptical side and try to answer it in a historical way, first and foremost.
PJ Wehry (01:33.506)
Mm.
Eric Nelson (02:02.006)
And because it's such a well-known topic among scholars of the field, if not even though it's contentious more broadly, I did to do something else in the book as well. So I also provided a Taoist critique of Heidegger, what Heidegger misses and what would have helped him maybe in his thinking if he had pursued it further. And I provide Taoist reasons for why Heidegger's take on things are not as good as they could have been, that he could have learned more from Taoism, it could have improved it.
certain points in his philosophy further that he doesn't take up. So I feel I have a very generous reading of Heidegger in some ways. Like I'm just not denouncing him for political or other reasons. I want to read him in a more charitable way. So I appreciate charity and reading. That's the principle of Hermedix, of course, to be open to the author, to see what they're trying to see, read his or her works from their own position, and try not to just...
denounce it. And one problem in current philosophy, philosophical circles, is maybe it's been influenced by social media where people just want gotcha moments or to denounce people without even considering what's going on. And I think Heidegger has been in particular a victim of that because there lot of people who say we should not even read him or just denounce him without even understanding the complex context of what is going on. So this book is really an exploration and intercultural hermeneutics. I want a more complex way of reading and interpreting authors.
And I want to apply this to Heidegger to say, hey, he's doing something real with Taoism. There are all these sources where he's obviously referring to it. They intersect with the key concepts of his thought. So we just can't dismiss it as a mere accidental curiosity or enthusiasm, but rather there's a serious engagement going on. And it intersects with the core concepts in his own thinking, especially those that characterize his later philosophy. So basically, I wanted to write a book that wasn't available because I wanted to read it.
and I think for myself to see how this is playing out. So that's something I try to do in my work is do something that is not available, something that is of interest to me, because I'm not sure how the audience will respond. So at least you have to do interesting work for yourself to keep this motivated, right? So Hannah Arensa, we write first and foremost for ourselves, right? Then hopefully it will address an audience and find an audience who will respond to it. But that's the part that's outside of our control.
PJ Wehry (04:09.163)
You
PJ Wehry (04:13.089)
Yes.
PJ Wehry (04:25.378)
Yeah, I'm always a big fan of charitable reading. so I love that you've mentioned that.
Eric Nelson (04:34.168)
Right, you mentioned it in the opening earlier, so I think it's really important as a hermetic principle to try to, and especially historical principle, is the historian tries to understand what is going on first and foremost. The great German 19th century historian, Roenke, said we have to see people from their own perspective, their own point of view. That actually takes up this hermetic principle of interpreting things from out of themselves that influence Diltai and then the early Heidegger. So I think Heidegger is part of this hermetic tradition as well, of trying to look at a phenomena.
look at a phenomenon in its own context and interpret it in relationship to how it is appearing, how it is structured in its own terms. I think this is still a good principle in how to interpret text and how to converse with others as well. That we need to learn from others, even people we disagree with in particular, so we have to have some way of talking to them and communicating with them. But the problem is that the current public sphere is so aggressive and violent that there's no communication going on.
So there's not much possibility for charitable reading if people are in a polemic with each other trying to, you know.
make each other emotional, through calling each other names or whatever it might be.
PJ Wehry (05:44.138)
And I think we're still learning. go ahead. Sorry.
Eric Nelson (05:44.428)
And of course, this is interesting.
Well, just add this interesting principle in Heidegger as well, because he has this whole critique of the fallenness of the public in being in time. And even though we might be suspicious of his political motives, although I think that's too early, historically speaking, that is an important thing to keep in mind is how the public can become self-obsessed, self-blocking, and not really engage with each other. So it becomes more like a gossip and an accusation game rather than really communicating with each other.
PJ Wehry (06:17.654)
And I think too, and this goes along with it, I've had a guest on talking about Heidegger's views on technology. And it really seems that we are serving the algorithms rather than the algorithms serving us. that's a, know, even as you talk about, nevermind the viciousness of the rhetoric, which I think I agree is happening. We also just have the echo chamber and the reinforcement because we don't understand
how to properly use the technology we have or the people who are in charge of it are using like giving it as a public service properly.
Eric Nelson (06:55.338)
Right. Yes, I think some people say, this proves that democracy, public sphere and so on are failures, that they cannot work right. But I think there's a really pathological form of it, that there's a lot of manipulation going on with people following a political agenda and then trying to just scare people from speaking. So if you get 100 negative comments and those are the only basically the only ones you get, it's hard to participate on social media and such an environment and feel
PJ Wehry (07:01.185)
Yeah.
Eric Nelson (07:25.134)
you're going to learn anything from it in the long run. And now they have automated bots and so on, so it's not much of a sphere for free discussion.
PJ Wehry (07:34.804)
certainly not charitable. I'm curious to ask you mentioned that a lot of the material on Heidegger and the Tao is out of date because of new documentation. What are some of the new documentation that's come out that has further amplified but has shown how much greater his interest in the Tao is?
Eric Nelson (07:36.782)
Yeah, exactly.
Eric Nelson (08:01.87)
So I can give a few examples, but look at the book for a fuller list. I'll go over all of them right now. But basically in the 1980s, 90s, early 2000s, there was a lot of interest in this topic and there are a number of references available and Heidegger's works and correspondence are already available. And that's what these authors used. So I don't blame them, it's just the circumstances of the time, what was available. But sometimes they speculated about the origins of the intersection between Daoism and Heidegger in a way that they could not confirm.
PJ Wehry (08:04.3)
Please. Yes.
Eric Nelson (08:32.25)
For one example, a couple years ago, his lecture versions of many of his famous essays appeared in two volumes. And the first versions of the essay, The Essence of Truth, when it was just a lecture, has all these references to the Dao De Jing in it. And so earlier we knew of this anecdote that after he gave this talk in Bremen, he quoted from the Zhuangzi and read a story.
of the happy fish from the Zhuangzi at a dinner party. And everyone speculated, the essence of truth sounds like it could be influenced by Daoism, but we didn't really know exactly what happened. But now we have the lecture version from Bremen that he gave right before the dinner party where he recited the Zhuangzi. And there he refers to the Dao Jing repeatedly in terms of darkness and light, the play of darkness and light, of concealment and unconcealment.
And this goes to the core of his emerging later philosophy that it's all about this play of these elements of being, right? Nothingness and being, lightness, darkness, and so on. And he connects it directly with the Dao Jing. And it's interesting because there's been a long argument about whether these are just early Greek pre-Socratic concepts, that he's drawing them from Parmenides and Heraclitus in particular, or whether he's really learning something from Daoism.
But I would say it has to be both because initially he has these Greek concepts where they also refer to darkness and light and being and nothingness and so on. But we know from Parmenides that they privilege one set over the other set. So the Greeks do have this dyad, but there's a hierarchy within the dyad. But in beginning in 1930, Heidegger is much more open to saying, well, it's not just the hierarchy, there's more of interplay and mutuality. And this refers directly to the style de jing quote that he has there.
that if you want to know the light, you need to preserve the dark. And that's very much an insight from Lao Tse Dao De Jing that Parmenides probably would not have agreed on, right? Because Parmenides is the philosopher of being, of the light, of all these classical Greek concepts. And in Heidegger, there's a shift. So he always privileges pre-Socratic philosophy over Chinese or Taoist philosophy, that's for sure. And some people say, well, obviously he's pre-Socratic influenced. He's not.
Eric Nelson (10:50.796)
influenced by Taoism in the course of his work. He has many works on Heraclitus and a few on Parmenides, and he has no actual books on the Dao De Jing or Zhuangzi. But at the same time, there are these references and indications that he's deeply engaged with the Dao De Jing and Zhuangzi in particular, and that this is shaping how he's reading these pre-Socratic texts. So often people have noticed that his reading of the pre-Socratics is somewhat called eccentric. I would say it's open to...
different interpretations where you're seeing something different in them. And I would say one of the elements in seeing pre-Socratic philosophy differently is drawing from these Chinese sources. Because there a lot of analogies that what can make between, say, Heraclitus and Laozi or Zhuangzi, but also Parmenides as well, if you read them in a more Heideggerian way, which I try to do in this work.
PJ Wehry (11:29.632)
Which would make sense, yeah.
PJ Wehry (11:44.332)
Yeah, awesome. For our audience, I mean, I'll say our audience, but really for me, because in just the barest way, I've heard about the Tao and the Way, and even concepts like Dharma. Do you mind kind of teasing out, you know, there's this translation of the Way in English, and then you say Tao, and you say, I understand that Dharma is loosely related with Tao.
Eric Nelson (12:07.607)
Yes.
PJ Wehry (12:14.21)
Be misunderstanding that.
Eric Nelson (12:15.01)
Yeah, well it's a Buddhist concept that gets intersected with Tao in China, because when they introduced the Dharma, the Buddhist Dharma, the Buddhist way into China, they of course link it with Tao, because in China, Tao is simply a way of philosophizing. So there's Taoism, but actually all the Chinese philosophies use this word Tao to refer to what their teaching is. So Tao literally does mean way, so even in China or Hong Kong or Taiwan today, or Japan as well sometimes, they use Chinese characters.
you can see the Tao character, right? Because it simply means away, a small path. So Tao is a very everyday word, but at the same time it has this profound philosophical meaning that it means the way of doing something. It can also mean in a more narrow sense method, which it does in certain philosophies that are more like mohism, more technical, but usually it means a way of walking, of carrying oneself, of kind of ability to interact with the world in a particular way.
So that was not a method in a limited sense usually, but more like wayfaring. And in that way, it deeply resonates not just with Heidegger, but with German philosophy in so far that it embraced the notion of vague way. So there's a strong resonance here between the German and Chinese philosophical traditions to use this word in that way. And of course, we know the word way now with like the Mandalorian and so on. So we have our own sense in the English speaking world now. obviously way can be a very powerful metaphor or image for
opening up our thinking. And so Heidegger really wants to insist that we should think of philosophy not as a doctrine or a theory or even a teaching in a particular sense, but rather as a way that along the way there are turnings and twistings and shifts. So our thinking always has to be open and responsive to the changing situation in which it finds itself. And he often likes to compare it to these early images from the rural countryside. So he talks about felt vague, field way.
which is a way along the country path where you see a tree that you know and are familiar with and the tree is slightly changed due to the seasons and then you're in tune with that tree because you walk by it every day. So that's the field way. But there's also what he calls Holzwege, forest ways. And these are not the well-manicured forests that we might be familiar with in some places today, but it's more of a uncurated forest where you walk along the path and then it just stops.
Eric Nelson (14:38.444)
or you open up and you find yourself in the clearing where there's opening where the light shines through and there's just a space to contemplate and meditate on the world. And so these forest ways are also an image of thinking for him. Because when we think we can pursue things and then find ourselves in at that end where we have to double track or might find ourselves in opening where things are revealed to us. So this is part of the openness of the way that we have to be resonant with.
in order to think in a way that's more responsive to things and our situation. And this is associated with his notion of freedom that develops in his later thinking as well.
PJ Wehry (15:18.87)
I actually had a different question, but I feel like where you ended, I, please expound on the freedom.
Eric Nelson (15:25.88)
sure, yeah. And so the way, both in the Chinese context, and I would say in Heidegger's as well, has a certain kind of freedom to it. So especially in Zhuangzi, he talks about free and easy wandering. So Zhuangzi's way is even more open-ended than what we find in other early Taoist sources like the Tao Te Jing or Leitse or other such texts. So Zhuangzi is all about free and easy wandering. That you can't even have a kind of purpose, right?
because the purpose would limit your wandering. So freedom means to freely encounter things, freely move along with them, transform with them, and keep on moving in a certain way. Where you're not forcing yourself to move, but you simply stop to smell the flowers if you want to. They use a kind of cliche, but you stop and see things and you move. And whatever is happening, you're interacting with, you're responding to at the same time. That is what Zhuangzi means by freedom.
And in the later Heidegger, we have a sense of freedom that has some affinities with that that maybe is partially drawn from his reading of Taoism along with German and Greek philosophical sources. Because for the later Heidegger, freedom is always freedom within not just a situation, but within an embodied environmental situation. So Heidegger is very interesting because he always emphasizes how we're always within an environment, even being in time.
But in this later thinking, this is much more concretely embodied in being in a forest bath, for example, or in a field in the countryside, or I would say even in a city, urban environment, even though Heidegger doesn't talk about those. We have a certain sense of encountering what is around us, and the freedom is our freedom to respond in one way or another. So we're not free in that we can do or think whatever we want whenever is possible, right? We're not gods of some kind.
but rather we do have a kind of freedom to how we respond to our own situation. So obviously there are lot of things outside of our power, outside of our control, that are determined by other people or other things, and then freedom would be what we do in relationship to that. Because there is where we have a certain sensibility and choice, right?
PJ Wehry (17:28.839)
as com-
PJ Wehry (17:35.158)
Yes, as opposed to allowing ourselves, we are not free if we allow ourselves to be constrained by things other than our immediate context. If we're allowing something from the past or something from the future, like a worry or fear that isn't actually present, that may or may not come to pass, that we're giving up our freedom. Would that be a right way to think about it?
Eric Nelson (17:57.977)
Well, say that freedom also includes this notion of absence. So one thing he learns from the Dao De Jing, I argue in the book, he gains appreciation of absence, darkness, nothingness. That's slightly there earlier, but he's still wary of these kinds of concepts because his early philosophy is more Greek and privileging light, presence. So often Heidegger is known as a philosopher of presence. So Derrida, for example, critiques the metaphysics of presence in Heidegger.
And I think that is the dominant Greek drawn or Greek born model in Heidegger's thinking. It's clearly there throughout his life. He keeps on referring to presence being this crucial category. It's his basic definition of being from 1930 to the end of his life. But at other times he develops a more, I would say, complex model that is more in tune with his reading of these Daoist sources. Because there he says it's not just presence, but it's the play of absence and presence, of emptiness and fullness.
So you just don't privilege presence over absence, but you realize that even absent things can shape us as well. And this is very powerfully presented in the dialogue on language with a Japanese interlocutor, a gizunte. Bless you. So in that text from the mid-1950s, it's a reproduction but a transformation of a dialogue he had with a Japanese intellectual. So it's really not a literal conversation that happened.
PJ Wehry (19:06.562)
you
Eric Nelson (19:23.126)
It did happen, but then he rewrote it in his own way to make his own philosophical points. But that whole dialogue is about the notion of emptiness. And this is something he learns from East Asian philosophy in particular. I would say from Taoism, which he doesn't mention in that particular essay, but also from his engagement with Japanese intellectuals and how they draw on Taoism and Zen Buddhism. And of course, Zen Buddhism is a very Taoist influenced form of Buddhism that developed in China and then was transmitted to Japan, Korea.
Vietnam. And so the certain notion of emptiness there as being a not just a negative thing that we confront but a condition of possibility. And emptiness becomes the site where things can gather, where people can gather. So for example this dialogue centers around their dead friend Kukishutsu. He was a Japanese intellectual who studied with Heidegger in the 1920s, one of the very early students of Heidegger.
So they had dinner together, they conversed all the time, they had a very close friendship as far as we can tell, and he no doubt introduced Heidegger to a number of Chinese and Japanese concepts, even though they don't refer to it in the 1920s. But they do in this dialogue. And there, the absence of the friend gathers their ability to reminisce about the friend, remember the friend, and engage with the topics that interested them previously in the 1920s.
So they talk about the hermetic of facticity, which was Heidegger's project in 20s. But they also talk about him returning to Japan and writing his book on this notion of Japanese aesthetics. And all of the different images throughout this dialogue are always images of emptiness and how absence emptiness is not just a negative limit or a negation, but rather opens up the very possibility of what is happening there. It's gathering things. And this intersects very well with his later thinking of
the Dao Jing as well. So from 1943 to 1950, 51, there were a series of essays where explicitly it talks about the Dao De Jing in terms of the emptiness of the thing. That's a very famous image from the Dao De Jing chapter 11 that he returns to again and again, not just once, at least four times. So it shows that it's his thinking, right? And it reappears in four different essays and writings.
Eric Nelson (21:44.249)
So something that is on his mind and what he's really concerned with is how the thing is able to gather precisely through absence, through emptiness. And so this shows that these categories usually have a very negative connotation in the Western philosophical tradition, stemming from not only Greek philosophy but Christian philosophy. Usually nothingness is seen as something negative. In the European context, even emptiness usually means something bad. If people say, I feel empty, that means they feel negative about themselves.
But in Buddhist philosophy and in Taoist philosophy and then later East Asian philosophies, these terms are not negative. Rather, they are what we might call constitutive. They allow being to operate in the way that it does. They allow things to gather the world, right, in Heidegger's later essays on the thing. The thing is not just a vehicle of our projections, as we might often think, not a mere indifferent object, but rather it's something that is itself gathering the world.
So there we see this intersection between this hermeneutical side of Heidegger that we need to attend to and be responsive to the thing in its own situation. And then also this, what we might call a daoist side or semi-daoist side where he says, well, the thing is not just passively there, it is a way in which the world is being gathered and constituted. And so to understand or relate to an environment, we need to engage these things as having a certain kind of autonomy in how they relate and interact with their environment.
that the things are what constitutes a locality, a place, and all of its richness and depth, not just the abstract objects that we think about in a more metaphysical or scientific way.
PJ Wehry (23:21.174)
We've talked, you've mentioned emptiness quite a bit and darkness has been mentioned a couple of times, but I think you mentioned a little bit more earlier. And there was one particular phrase that really stood out to me that I wanted to ask you about, even just a phrase might be too long, but the nurturing darkness. Can you talk a little bit how what you've been talking about deals with the nurturing darkness? I think it flows pretty much with what you're talking about.
Eric Nelson (23:40.166)
yes,
Eric Nelson (23:47.469)
Right. And so I think in early Greek poetry, for example, there are things about darkness that are very interesting. Hadaguer was probably drawing on and Hadaguer had in mind in interpreting pre-Socratic philosophers like Parmenides and Heraclitus and so on. But there's a certain notion of how darkness, nothingness are nurturing of life. are what more recent Chinese people work in Chinese philosophy called generative.
So one of my colleagues in Hong Kong has a concept called generative nothingness, which I happily borrowed from him. So I think it does apply not just to the early Taoist sources, it applies more broadly to the Chinese intellectual tradition. I think this is something that Heidegger picks up on very strongly. So he doesn't read Taoist texts in a very systematic way. He's not a synologist. He never wrote a book about any of these sources. And yet he picks up these concepts in these short discussions, and then they are
used throughout his later writings. So some people say, well, he's plagiarizing these Daoist sources. I don't think that's very uncharitable. He's not just plagiarizing. He's learning, right? And he's adopting. And he's connecting his own thinking, his own way of conceiving things with these Daoist concepts. And they're expanding what he's doing, I would say, in important ways. And so one thing is that darkness is not something negative, but is where life regenerates.
This is a very old Chinese image that we find in Taoist sources, but also in the commentaries on the I Ching. So nothingness is not just a negation of being. And so one really powerful thing in the Chinese transmission that Heidegger picks up on that resonates deeply in its own thinking is that nothingness, negation are not just nothing or negation in the negative sense. They're not just limitations or derivative of these positive concepts of being or affirmation.
And so this something he learns from Taoism where darkness preserves safeguards, allows things to emerge. And basically we have to think that early Chinese are living in a very hot environment. So of course China has deserts, but it's not entirely a desert, but it's fairly hot in the summer and dry. So the water that comes in the spring is associated with life. So this is the image of the dragon. The myth is that the dragon lives in the pool, right? And then stirs and brings the rains in the spring.
Eric Nelson (26:10.434)
and that brings life to all things. So again, here darkness and coolness are associated with life. And too much sun, too much light is associated with death because things just dry out and die then. So the darkness, the moisture is what allows things to emerge, to grow and be sustained. And so this image becomes very powerful in Chinese philosophy and later forms of neoconfusionism that draw on I Ching commentaries and later Taoism and some Buddhists pick up on this as well.
that darkness and nothingness are where we regenerate. And so in meditation, we return to stillness and darkness, not just to be totally blank and indifferent, because this is where life rejuvenates itself. So returning to the dark means returning to life, really. And it's interesting because this is often misinterpreted. People say, the Chinese are nihilistic. The Taoists or later Confucians who talk about this because they say, you should embrace darkness, right? That sounds really evil.
But saying that darkness is evil is a very much a certain European concept of darkness, right? Because most people don't think darkness is evil. It's necessary to life. And especially in Chinese philosophy, returning to darkness means rejuvenation. And so if you have that image of darkness as rejuvenation, and then you have a notion of nothingness, well, nothingness is where things emerge, where beings arise. Without nothingness, there would not be being. And therefore, nothingness, darkness, concealment, all of these notions that sound
PJ Wehry (27:11.819)
Yeah.
Eric Nelson (27:35.587)
maybe negative in a certain kind of tradition, or in fact not negative. And this is something that Heidegger clearly embraces. He agrees with this. So earlier, he doesn't have that same language or same sensibility because he's unfamiliar with these Daoist sources. But once he engages them, then he's willing to say, well, we need darkness to preserve the light. Obviously, we want lights, like the Greek philosophers and the Enlightenment and so on say. But to have light, you need darkness.
Likewise, to have being in the way that we do, you need nothingness. And so there's a very interesting shift that occurs in Heidegger, where he begins with an existentialist notion of nothingness as something that is terrifying and the abyss and so on, right? So if we read Kierkegaard or Nietzsche or earlier Schopenhauer, usually nothingness has a certain kind of negative kind of terror to it. It's the abyss where everything becomes meaninglessness and nihilistic, right? We get this notion of nihilism from that.
But if you look at Chinese discourses, nothingness doesn't have that extreme, negative, existential character. Rather, it is what constitutes our ability to be. But also, by returning or being in tune with nothingness, we are emancipated, we are liberated, we become free. And that's another sense of freedom that Heidegger picks up, I argue, in relationship to Taoist sources. Because it's very much a notion of freedom that we find in Taoism. You need to return to the nothing, and then you heal yourself.
connect with the healing power, the nourishing powers of life, but also you are liberated and freed as well. So by fasting the heart-mind, there's a very famous passage from the Dronza that Heidegger refers to without quoting in later, in these dialogues from the mid-1940s. And so there, fasting the heart-mind means emptying the heart-mind, unfixating it, freeing it from all of its obsessions and fixations and anxieties and worries.
And by unfixing the heart mind, you free it, you empty it, and emptiness means freedom. And it's interesting that Heidegger is picking up on this language that's clearly from these Taoist sources. So he's referring to these Taoist sources, and then he's picking up certain elements that are shaping how he's interpreting the Western, the accidental as he calls it, philosophical tradition. And of course, his own developing thought as it emerges from the 30s into the 40s and his post-war work.
PJ Wehry (29:57.594)
I think that one tremendous answer. Thank you. I really appreciate it. I think the right response to that is we have this trajectory of Heidegger's thought. have this. Well, I know the turn has specific things, so I won't necessarily get I don't know if we have time for that, but I obviously had massive effects. But what is it to get to the second part of your book, then what do you see is a real critique from
Eric Nelson (30:17.122)
Yeah, sure.
PJ Wehry (30:27.394)
Daoist thought to what Heidegger's project was.
Eric Nelson (30:34.466)
Yeah, that's a very important question as well. And so basically in the last chapters of the work, I look at some of the pitfalls of Heidegger's thinking about nothingness and things and freedom. And I look at it from the perspective of Taoism, early Taoism, the Tao, the Jing and Zhuangzi, and then also from Buddhism as well. So the final chapter actually has a Taoist and a Buddhist kind of discussion analysis of Heidegger.
There a lot of things one can say about Heidegger's philosophy, but I think even though he's picking up this more open, more playful interpretation of being in nothingness, lightness and darkness from the Daodejing and Zhuangzi, in the end, he doesn't fully embrace it because in the end, remains, I would say, with Derrida's critique that he is captured in kind of metaphysics of presence in the end. Because even in the 60s or his final writings or audiences in the early 70s before he died,
He still privileges, usually, presence, right? So I think a lot of the mainstay Heidegger interpreters are actually right when they say this is a philosophy of presence, ultimately. And my argument is, well, it isn't and it isn't because he himself breaks with it many times. And this is because Heidegger has this wonderful quality of always being very experimental in his thinking. He's always reworking his own concepts, trying to shift them. And when he's shifting and more experimental, I would say is when Heidegger is at his best.
But when Heidegger returns to his standard model of presence, then I think Heidegger is deeply problematic. Because I would say the absence-presence model is a much more powerful one than the mere presence one. So sometimes Heidegger will say, from the 30s through the early 70s, well, being is just presence, right? But if you read him seriously, he shouldn't say that. Because even in Being and Time, he says, well, being is always identified with presence, but I find it's really problematic.
But unfortunately, when he's reading the pre-Socratics, he returns to this presence model, because that's the way he reads Parmenides and Heraclitus as complementary thinkers. So I think this metaphysics of presence model does confine him in a way to be even less experimental than he could have been, even though there's a lot of experimentation going on in his thinking. And so I tend to think Heidegger is better when he's shifting and playing with his concepts, trying to revise them. And that's a wonderful thing about Heidegger, is every time he re-engages with a topic, he's doing so in a slightly different way.
Eric Nelson (32:54.786)
So he has all these endless notebooks. And if you read it not knowing Heidegger, it seems like he's just saying the same thing over and over again in all these notebooks from the 30s and 40s and so on. But actually there are all these differences that he's developing and that he's playing with. So he's trying to alter that model of presence, of the event and so on, and see if he can think them in more, what he calls more radical or more original terms. And so I think that Heidegger has allowed to teach us because Heidegger has problems, of course, of various kinds, but he's very open to
questioning his own thinking and trying to overcome the limitations of his own thinking. So he's someone who wrote a book that became very popular and influential, Being in Time. He could have just said, I'm the author of Being in Time, that's it. But he spent the next 20 years trying to overcome being in time. And so often, in these notebooks in the 30s and 40s, he's his deepest critic, right? He's saying being in time is limited. It's committed to all these problematic metaphysical notions still. It's not radical enough. I have to do something more radical.
PJ Wehry (33:39.426)
Hmm.
Eric Nelson (33:52.365)
And in the end, you can say, well, he doesn't quite write another work like that. He writes different works, of course, that are very important, but he never wrote a work that had the power of being in time once again. And in the 50s and 60s, he can speak as the author of being in time. He can speak as the philosopher of presence once again, and be somewhat more just repeating what his earlier thinking was about without challenging it. And so the Heidegger I like is the one who challenges his own thinking that tries to move beyond it or think with it and beyond it.
PJ Wehry (34:23.584)
Yes. And you've kind of mentioned interplay a little bit, that seems to be kind of what you love about Heidegger. As you talk about being and nothingness, light and darkness, how does the concept of play fit into that and what makes Heidegger, Heidegger at his best?
Eric Nelson (34:29.387)
and
Eric Nelson (34:44.082)
Yeah, so play is like one image we can use to explore what Heidegger is doing. So it's a really crucial notion in German aesthetic philosophical tradition. So not only Heidegger, but Gadamer and earlier Diltai and the paramedics of course use this notion of play. But I think play is a very important model or indication of what we can do in thinking. That we don't think of thinking as just a static hierarchy, where we set up a bunch of concepts and they have a static hierarchical relationship to each other.
But we allow these concepts to speak to each other and modify one another. And so I think what Heidegger does in his so-called later poetic thinking after the turn is allow these concepts and words to play or speak to each other in a way that a hierarchical conceptual system doesn't allow us. And so I think this kind of play opens up our ability to not just use words in a more poetic way or more mysterious way. If you look at it negatively, you might say it's kind of obscurantism. I don't think it's that.
because it allows us to speak to things in the world as well. Because what Heidegger wants is not just a language that speaks about other words in the end, but a language that interacts with, is in play with the things of the world. It allows us to say what a thing is in its own thingliness, in its own environment, in its own verbal character of how the thing, to use a Heideggerian colloquialism, the thing is thinking, he says, to think things. Basically, when Heidegger does things like that, what he's trying to do is show the verbal character of something we take as a noun or an essence.
PJ Wehry (36:02.284)
Yeah
Eric Nelson (36:10.126)
So the essence is actually a kind of essence thing, right? It has a verbal quality that is transforming, it is playing. It's not just a closed static concept or substance that dominates, and then that's it. But rather, we have to allow the thing to unfold itself. And to allow the thing to unfold itself means we need to look at it, listen to it, address it, see it in its own situation and context and what it is doing. We see it as having kind of activity as well.
And this is something that I would say is also deeply resonant with these early Daoist sources. So again, I don't think that's exclusively what it is, right? Because there's actually a whole thing, metaphysics, in these German poets that Heidegger likes. So at the turn of the century, Rilke, Hofmannsthal, and other Austrian poets had this whole technique of the kind of poetics of things, right? Allowing the thing to address us in this poetic way. And obviously that's a very powerful source for Heidegger.
PJ Wehry (36:42.668)
Yeah, it's good to ask.
Eric Nelson (37:06.744)
He's clearly picking up on that and learning from these poets. And he's always talking about Rilke in this way as well. And also he goes back to Herliland. And initially when he introduces the Dao De Jing, the number of these texts in the 40s, he's talking about Herliland as a poetic thinker, and then Laozi as another poetic thinker. But the poetic thinker is the one who speaks to and allows the thing to speak back, right?
And speaking is here used in a very loose sense.
PJ Wehry (37:34.922)
Yes, yes, yes. So I don't want to be respectful of your time, but I love that you have very you're Yeah, no, it's just been great. I love that you have a clear application kind of at the end. You're fighting for the unfettering of potential. And you talk about the need for humans for us to be responsibly tuned.
Eric Nelson (37:36.43)
Bye.
Eric Nelson (37:41.232)
sure, that's fine, yeah. Simon's right, it's-
PJ Wehry (38:03.254)
and to be eco-mimetic. Can you talk us through what does it mean to be responsibly tuned? I think that one you kind of mentioned a little bit, but I would love to hear more. mean, one, I'd love to go to a dinner party and say eco-mimetic and know what I'm talking about. You know, it's a great dinner party. It's a great, great $5 word, please, please explain.
Eric Nelson (38:17.41)
That's right. Right. Here. You guys can go. Yeah.
Okay, so first off about responsiveness and responsive attunement. That's basically how I interpret the notion of non-doing of wu-wei in early Daoist sources. So sometimes it's translated as non-action. That literally is how it should be translated, but it's not literal non-action and doing the sitting and doing nothing at all. Rather it means a non-coercive action. It means being attuned to the things and situation around you and responding to it.
So wu-wei, I argue, is more of an attunement, more of a responsiveness, more of a resonance. So often in the Chinese, early Chinese commentaries, in Chinese ascetic tradition, they talk about co-resonance, that in non-doing you are co-resonant with the thing or with the other person. And again, in Heidegger, there's a correlate with this in Glossensheit, and some people argue, well, this is only from German mysticism, from Meister Eckhart, and maybe later German idealists who talk about it, or Romantics and so on.
19th century discourses about mysticism and Meister Eckhart pick up on this word, galassenheit. So Heidegger is not the first one to use galassenheit. So obviously he's drawing on this rich German religious and philosophical tradition. And galassenheit means to let be. In Meister Eckhart, letting be means you let be and God does, right? So usually in Christian mysticism, to let be means to let God take over and drive the buses. They say in America these...
some parts right so basically it's letting be means you don't be exactly Jesus takes the wheel I think version of that basically letting be gloss and height right Lassen has this quality of letting God do you don't do in the Christian tradition and obviously it takes on this more metaphysical mystical quality beginning with myster record because he's kind of heterodox views of God and so on and nothingness that are actually very interesting
PJ Wehry (39:49.932)
Jesus take the wheel. Yeah.
Eric Nelson (40:15.63)
So Heidegger is primarily drawing on that. But I, again, argue in this book, right, even though that some people say, well, this is all Meister Eckhart that has nothing to do with Daoism, really. I argue no, in fact, it does because his letting be, Heidegger's letting be actually is closer to the Daoist notion of responsively being attuned to the thing, to the things around us, the environment, the situation, rather than simply letting God take the wheel. So of course, there are interpretations of Heidegger that say, just...
drop back, hang out, let being do everything, right? But I think that's actually a pretty bad interpretation of Heidegger. That's a kind of caricature. Heidegger doesn't say the human does nothing, being does everything, so you just sit there and let being drive the wheel, so to speak, right? I think that's not what Heidegger is up to. when he talks about the lost in Heidegger, he talks about a kind of disposition or attunement, not just with the divine, with God, but with things around us, very earthly, concrete things, with the field way, the forest way, with the...
the different objects that we're interacting with. So here it's about a kind of resonance and responsiveness with things, and he talks about it in a very non-theological, even non-metaphysical way in a traditional sense. And this way I think his notion of galassanthide is more resonant with the Taoist notion of non-action wu-wei. It has a kind of co-resonance with things rather than a kind of divine unity that we leave, let aside in the end.
So again, when he talks about Wuhui and Daoistandoing and so on, he closely links it with his notion of galassanthide as well. So obviously this is in Heidegger's own mind. And so we can say, well, maybe he just played with that a little bit, but it's not really serious. But I argue in the book, actually, it does shape how he's thinking of galassanthide as like resonance or responsiveness with things and attunement with them. Because this, would say, argue is more of a early Chinese model.
especially in Daoism, rather than something we see in the German mystical tradition. So of course in German mysticism and the German poetics of the thing in Rilke and Hofmannsthal, we have this kind of mysticism of little things, they call it, where you see a kind of God in the vase or something like that. So I think that could be part of Heidegger's background knowledge as well, or awareness as well, that's obviously there. But where he takes it in the end, shifts it away from this more Christian, ontotheological.
Eric Nelson (42:41.496)
context, it makes it much more of a kind of environmental, philosophical conception of how to interact with the things around us. And this is why think Heidegger still has something to say to us, not only philosophically, but also about the environment as well. Because one thing we can learn to do is listen to or respond to the little things around us in the more attuned ways. And of course, that's not going to solve all our environmental problems because they're so massive at this point. But does something for us in our own environment that we can respond to the thing, try to
attend to it in its own characteristics, right, and see what it is actually doing and how it is functioning, so to speak, and then live with it in that way, allow it to be. Because part of the glossenheit for Heidegger, earlier might say, well, it's up to us to be letting be to our glossen, right? But in the end, the glossenheit is not the glossenheit of us, it's what he calls the glossenheit of things, the letting be of things. Because the things are already letting be, and that is what allows us to let those things be as well, right?
And this is very much in tune with how a Daoist would talk about letting be in things. That the things are already doing what they're doing, but we humans are the ones who are kind of messing everything up by our inability to interact with them, right? In the appropriate way. So part of Daoism is how to be appropriately attuned to one's environment. How to cultivate and develop that sensibility, because obviously various humans have lost it. Even though we are born that way, we lose it in a way. Through culture, through society.
PJ Wehry (43:41.291)
Yes.
Eric Nelson (44:10.958)
through certain patterns of power or how we interact with the environment, we lose our sense of what the environment is actually doing and what things within the environment are doing. And I think Heidegger has a similar sensibility, either directly or indirectly, in relationship to these Taoist sources, where he says, no, we have to be attuned to these environments and see how they constitute us. That's not just us shaping the environment, but the environment that is shaping us in this really powerful way. I think that's one thing missing in...
our current conception or practices with the environment as we see what we can do for the environment or do to it, but we don't see that the environment is actually what allows us to do anything at all,
PJ Wehry (44:50.338)
And forgive me. Good.
Eric Nelson (44:52.13)
that it is constitutive. Sorry, I just want to say it is constitutive for us. So I'd hear later on his early thinking says we constitute the thing as object, as ready to hand or present to hand. So he's very much in this European instrumentalist conception of the thing and being in time. Although he does mention some interesting passages where the thing outside of our instrumentality might have some kind of characteristics we don't know about. But his later thinking is precisely about that.
how the thing outside of our own ability to use it or think about it has qualities that we need to be re-attuned to in order to flourish once again, to nourish our lives once again. So here Heidegger is intersecting with this Taoist notion of nourishing life. Because nourishing life is one of the fundamental concepts of early Taoism. And then it becomes kind of popularized in Chinese culture. So this notion of nourishing life becomes associated with Tai Chi and physical exercise and so on. So that's the meaning in
contemporary Chinese. So, but that's not the only meaning. So nourishing life can mean not just nourishing my own life through exercise, it can be nourishing the life of things and how I am attuned to things, how they nourish my life, then how I in turn can nourish the life of others around me. And this is something that Heidegger, I wouldn't say he's just copying it, but rather he's learning and adapting these elements from Taoist philosophy into his own.
PJ Wehry (46:18.954)
Yeah, excuse me. So.
There's a passage in one of his essays, and I can't remember the exact name of the essay. I think it has thing in the title where he talks about temple, how we have lost the ability to make a temple in the clearing in the moon and understand it the way that the Greeks did that we don't have. You know, he'll talk about gods and stuff like that. Is that a good example of when he's he is closer to that kind of Taoist notion?
Eric Nelson (46:29.496)
Mm-hmm.
Eric Nelson (46:44.782)
Right, the first one was you.
Eric Nelson (46:50.316)
Yeah, so that's a very interesting question. So I'm not sure if you're drawing from the origin of the work of art, but that's where he introduces this, how the Greek temple constitutes the world. I don't remember the moonlight passage, but someone's really good. there he talks about how the work of art, the temple, for example, or a painting like Van Gogh's shoes can not just give us a perspective, but it can constitute a world, right? And this is where he begins to see that the work of art can constitute the world.
PJ Wehry (46:56.246)
Yes. That's what it is. Yes. Yes.
PJ Wehry (47:11.318)
Yes.
Eric Nelson (47:18.978)
But one of the more radical things about his later philosophy, which I think is in tune with Taoism, these Taoist sources, is that the thing itself can constitute the world. It doesn't have to be a work of art. It can be an ordinary object can constitute the world. So it doesn't have to be Van Gogh's peasant shoes that discloses, constitutes the world, Rather, it can be a real pair of peasant shoes that encounters along the way. For example, you're just walking on the path and you see these peasant shoes and they kind of unfold that entire environment that you're then encountering, right?
So I think this is really part of his development of the notion of what things can do. It begins with this earlier model of the work of art. And then I think through these Taoist sources that he's interacting with, he then opens up to just ordinary things, simple things, right? And again, there are some German sources for that, like these German poetics of things, you might say, like Rilke writing about a shoe or something. That's obviously a poetic type of thing. I think he's drawing on that. But there is this Taoist model.
modification that's going on and Heidegger's thinking that he's picking up and I think he's bringing these Daoist elements along with the German mystical and the German poetic elements that he's drawing on as well.
PJ Wehry (48:28.994)
Thank you. And that's, I could see how it progresses from the origin of the work of art to something. So for art, you could still say it unfolds a world, but it's almost like we're unfolding worlds for other people when they could just go to the world itself. Okay.
Eric Nelson (48:30.541)
Yeah.
Eric Nelson (48:42.702)
Mm-hmm.
Yes, exactly. And so one thing I try to trace in my book is sometimes I have these sections that are not directly about Daoism. And so some readers might say, why is he not talking about Daoism? But in fact, I'm situating his development and how the Daoist elements kind of get incorporated into it. So for example, his account of the thing is fairly instrumentalist in the 1920s. And this is why some, especially Americans, read Heidegger as a kind of pragmatist, right? There's this whole pragmatist reading of Heidegger that's popular in North America.
PJ Wehry (48:55.094)
You
Eric Nelson (49:12.914)
And that's because in Being a Time, he talks about the instrumentality of the thing. And that is his early model. It's either something you use or something that's an object for science. But there's more to the thing than that, he sees. And I think it's through the artwork, through his reading of these Taoist sources about the thing, because the thing is a very crucial Taoist concept, that this modifies and gets him to see something different about the thing, that it doesn't have to be instrumentalized, the first model. It doesn't have to be massive or
creative work of art to open up a world, right? The second model. But it can be simply the ordinary thing that does it. And so even in his writings about the Dao De Jing and these essays from the 40s and early 50s, he talks about the empty vessel, for example. And there he's not just talking about the empty vessel from the Dao De Jing, but he talks about it as unfolding, forming a world, right? So obviously he's not just copying the Dao De Jing's empty vessel, he's using it to expand his own...
philosophical conception of world disclosure of world opening. And this is why I say he's not just a Daoist or a German Daoist or whatever we want to call it, but rather he's actually learning, adopting, but also pruning in a lot of ways. He's only picking up certain elements from these Daoist sources. They're only maybe five or six. Yeah, syncretizing and only with elements, right? He never picks up the entirety of the Dao De Jing and uses all of its concepts. He's picking up five or six different ideas or words.
PJ Wehry (50:26.924)
Syncretizing?
Eric Nelson (50:38.092)
and he's unfolding diamonds through his own thinking,
PJ Wehry (50:40.834)
Now, I want to be again, I want to make sure we kind of stay. Yeah, yeah. But if you don't mind, I'd love to hear too that was a great answer about the responsive tuning or being responsibly attuned. What is ecomimetic mean?
Eric Nelson (50:47.886)
I'll show you. Bye, next time.
Eric Nelson (51:03.563)
right, right, sorry, I forgot about that one.
PJ Wehry (51:04.83)
No, no worries. I asked too... the question was too big. That was my bad. Please, continue.
Eric Nelson (51:10.018)
Yeah, that's fine now. So ecomimetic is actually a word that's already used in certain environmental discourses. I, in earlier work with Adorno, Adorno likes this notion of mimesis as the basis of the concept. talk about, because I want to read Adorno in environmental way. So I changed Adorno's mimesis into eco-mimesis. So I take a concept that's already in use in environmental philosophy, then modify it through Adorno in earlier work, and now with Heidegger in this current work. Although Heidegger doesn't use the word mimesis really.
as far as I know, it's not a key concept for him. But eco-luminescence would be not just being attuned to the environment, but creating machines and technologies that would be attuned to the environment. So it's not just us humans doing things with the environment, right? But we're creating systems and structures and techniques and technologies and so on that adapt to the environment and that further the nourishing life of the environment, so to speak, rather than damaging and harming it.
So non-eco-mimetic technologies would be ones that devastate the environment, like ones that create a lot of pollution and so on. But eco-mimetic ones would be ones that adapt to the environment and integrate with it and further its own life. And so actually, I developed this in my work on Daoism first because there's an argument about whether Daoists allow for any technologies at all. So there's a debate. Well, they say, technology is bad. Therefore, you can't have anything. You just have to sit in your field and grow corn or something.
But actually growing corn or growing rice, right, it already involves technology. It already involves transforming the earth and the water and the wind and using all of these different elements. So actually, even early Dallas sources, if you read them, are not against transforming technologically nature, right? They're already doing that. But the key has to be how we go about doing it. Are we devastating the environment through our activity? Or are we using it in a way that...
allows it to nourish itself and reproduce itself. So basically, eco-mimesis is a very modern contemporary word from environmental philosophy. But I think it is better read in the context of Taoism or Heidegger or Adorno, where we can have a more deeper notion of what this mimesis involves, how we need to be attuned to the environment, but also create technologies that can be attuned to the environment as well, that can further the life, further the reproduction of life and flourishing of life.
Eric Nelson (53:35.465)
myriad ways, right, rather than decimating it. So our current technology has obviously created the climate crisis, but also are very devastating for ecosystems and species. So we're losing so many species right now, but ecomemetic technology would be able to interact with the environment the way where we use it as all animals do, right? Even the beaver creates dams and the water buffalo, you know, creates these waterways that allow other life forms to flourish. So
These are always eco-mimetic systems, right? And so we have to learn to be better adapted to these systems and enable them to flourish,
PJ Wehry (54:12.322)
That leads in and it might be the answer to my last question for you, but I'd love to end with this question. Besides buying and reading your excellent book, what is something that you would recommend to a listener after they've listened to us for about an hour here? What is something you tell them to either think about or do over the next week after listening to this episode?
Eric Nelson (54:40.076)
Right. Well, one thing I would do, I'm not sure how people would go about doing it, but maybe try to be more attuned to and resonant with the things around them, right, in their everyday environment. Because that would be an ultimate more powerful way of learning a philosophy than just reading. Like reading books are wonderful. I read the books all the time and write them as well. But in addition to that, it's good to encounter the environments one is dwells in, And so I would say try to get a sense of one's dwelling within the environment one is.
within, right? It doesn't have to be a field way out in the countryside. It can be in a city, in a garden, in a household, wherever one might be. So in a sense, think Heidegger, his language can be alienating to some people because he talks in this very rural way and obviously a lot of his critics say this is problematic in some way. I'm not against being rural at all, but you can be rural or you can be urban. And I think any environment you're within, you can learn from it.
you can adopt to it, you can begin to see what is going on with it, you can be attuned to the things within it and try to see them in their own terms, right? And how they are something that is sustaining, right, that world in which you are in. So I would say as a phenomenologist or maybe a Taoist as well, just look, just see, just learn, right, first and foremost. And of course, if you're learning from that, then you can read the books and develop a, you know, more detailed, more depth about what is going on there through Taoist sources or...
Phenomenological ones or environmental ones, whatever they might be. But I think there always has to be this experiential basis to thinking to give it a kind of orientation and depth that it doesn't have otherwise. Otherwise thinking philosophy can fall into mere technicalities, right? Where it becomes a kind of technique to produce arguments of a certain kind, but they don't have real implications for who and what we are and how we live, right?
PJ Wehry (56:27.19)
Beautiful answer. Dr. Nelson, Eric, wonderful to have you on today. Thank you.
Eric Nelson (56:33.512)
Thank you PJ. It's been a wonderful interview. Very nice to meet you online.