Martin Heidegger and His Japanese Interlocutors: About a Limit of Western Metaphysics

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht

Diacritics, Volume 30, Number 4, Winter 2000, pp. 83-101 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/dia.2000.0029

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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/dia/summary/v030/30.4gumbrecht.html

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MARTIN HEIDEGGER AND HIS JAPANESE INTERLOCUTORS

ABOUT A LIMIT OF WESTERN METAPHYSICS
HANS ULRICH GUMBRECHT
1 Quite obviously, the central position that Western philosophical discourses have assigned, over the past two centuries, to the concept of sense hinges upon the epistemological dominance of the Subject/Object paradigm. In whichever specific ways this concept has been defined (and we all know how confusing the range of those proposals has become),1 it always ends up referring to the modalities in which an ObserverSubject can refer to what (s)he is observing as the World of Objects. Making sense, then, may be described as the selection, performed by an observer, of a specific object of reference among all the objects of which the world is believed to consist; or as the drawing of a line by which (s)he makes a distinction, at every given moment, between those parts of the world that (s)he is observing and those that (s)he is not observing; or as the positioning of a chosen topic within a preexisting context of possible associations. All these different descriptions can be turned into definitions of sense making as long as they point to the awareness that whatever has been chosen, divided, or contextualized could have been chosen, divided, or contextualized differently. Another way of evoking the same type of relation between what remains potential and what becomes actual would be to say that the concept of sense always refers to cases of entropy transformed into structureunder the condition that alternative patterns of transforming entropy into structure remain available. What we call the Subjects consciousness (Bewusstsein) is the place where these selections take place and where their alternatives are held available. If we consider the Subject/Object paradigm as the core element of that style of philosophizing which has been called (sometimes from a purely descriptive and sometimes from a critical angle) Western metaphysics, then it is a both true and trivial conclusion to say that, within Western metaphysics, sense making is inevitable (that is, that Subjects cannot help producing sense and, also, that there can be no effects of sense without pointing to a Subject). An interesting case that proves the point of this implicational relationship is Niklas Luhmanns systems theory. Despite Luhmanns sustained effort to be epistemologically eccentric, despite all his great conceptual ambition to bypass the instance of the Subject,2 his books (and, above all, their reception) make it
1. The word will be used throughout this essay within the convention of the hermeneutic tradition, i.e. in the meaning that we presuppose when we say, for example, that an interpretation gives sense to a certain phenomenon. I will not enter into the complicated debate about the semantic distinctions that have been proposed for the nouns sense and meaningthese two words will indeed be used synonymously. 2. See Luhmanns own explanation of this effort in On the Concepts Subject and Action.

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very clear how a philosophical discourse that gives as central a position to the concept of sense as Luhmanns cannot help producing Subject-effects. The frequently used everyday expression, on the other hand, that something makes no sense is not in conflict with our point about the inevitability of sense making within the metaphysicaland also within our Western everydayframework of discursive presuppositions. For if we say that something makes no sense, we are not using the word sense in accordance with the conventional philosophical meaning of sense making, and we are thus not referring to individual phenomena that would resist individual acts of sense attribution.3 Rather, when we say that something makes no sense, we react to situations where a (shorter or longer) sequence of those elementary and inevitable acts of sense attribution does not produce an impression of coherence or consistency; we refer to situations where we lack a larger perspective from which we could subsume the results of different individual acts of sense making [see Hahn]. Astonishingly enough (or not astonishingly at all), all those loud intellectual slogans from a decade or two ago about the death of the Subject never reached thisaltogether unsurprisingpoint: that any attempt at (or the mere historical process of) overcoming a Subject-centered epistemological tradition (or, with the more Heideggerian concept, of overcoming metaphysics) would have to ask how one couldbegin toavoid sense making. On the contrary, that weak subject and that so-called weak thinking as which the Subject/ Object paradigm seems to have survived the years of its premature death announcements have made sense making even more central4perhaps even more obsessive than it came to be in the philosophical past. For the difference between the traditional Subject and the new weak Subject seems to lie in the latter s higher awareness of the contingent character of any sense-making operation, both on the basic level and on the consistency-producing level. The weak Subject indeed produces a surplus of sense, due to the added obligation of commenting on his or her primary sense-making operations. Martin Heidegger, in contrast, seems to have been one of the surprisingly few Western philosophers (surprisingly few, at least in comparison to the Asian philosophical tradition) to have seriously pursued the nontrivial question of whetherand if so, how we can avoid producing sense on the basic level of our relationship to the world.5 Although the central position that Heidegger gave to interpretation and sense production in Sein und Zeit (1927) and his description of the average everydayness of human existence is not in flagrant contradiction with the question of how one can avoid sense making, it is quite clear that Heidegger s interest in this question developed hand in hand with the tendency of his later work to conceive of his own philosophizing as a way of discovering alternatives to what he calls the metaphysical tradition.6 But it is even
3. Individual acts of sense attribution can of course remain ambivalent or inconclusivebut this only proves that, even in difficult cases, we cannot stop producing sense. 4. See the maximalistic (but well-argued) claims of Gianni Vattimo in Beyond Interpretation. 5. Heidegger s is certainly not the only philosophical work where the question concerning the (in)evitability of sense making has been asked. This question has become increasingly important over the years for the work of Jean-Luc Nancyand one might add that Nancys work has become increasingly eccentric, within the predominantly hermeneutic scene of contemporary nonanalytic philosophy, to the extent that he has addressed this concern. See The Birth to Presence: A moment arrives when one can no longer feel anything but anger, an absolute anger, against so many discourses, so many texts that have no other care than to make a little more sense, to redo or perfect delicate works of signification. That is why, if I speak here of birth, I will not try to make it into one more accretion of sense. I will rather leave it, if this is possible, as the lack of sense that it is [5]. 6. From this point on, I will refrain from surrounding the word metaphysics with quotation marks. For it should have become sufficiently clear that I am trying to use it in the same way

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more interesting to realize that the one text in which, probably, he most insistently pursues this question is a text in which Heidegger tries to confront a non-Western thinking tradition. I am referring to A Dialogue on Language between a Japanese and an Inquirer (Aus einem Gesprch von der Sprachezwischen einem Japaner und einem Fragenden), written during the years 195354 and first published in the volume Unterwegs zur Sprache in 1959. The dialogue between an Inquirer (who of course stands for Heidegger himself) and a Japanese leaves no doubt indeed about the authors epistemological interest in developing a critique of a number of concepts that are at the center of the metaphysical tradition: I: To experience in this sense always means to refer backto refer life and lived experience back to the I. Experience is the name for the referral of the objective back to the subject. The much-discussed I/Thou experience, too, belongs within the metaphysical sphere of subjectivity. J: And this sphere of subjectivity and of the expression that belongs to it is what you left behind when you entered into the hermeneutic relation to the two-fold. I: At least I tried. The guiding notions which, under the names expression, experience, and consciousness, determine modern thinking, were to be put in question with respect to the decisive role they played. [3536] Later in this essay, we will discuss the central concepts of Heidegger s alternative epistemology, above all the complex notion of the two-fold. As a starting point, all that matters is to acknowledge that Heidegger tried to challenge and to rethink metaphysics (that is, the Subject/Object paradigm and its implications), and that he did so by questioning that metaphysical worldview which presupposes that there is (in the primary sense of the adjective metaphysical) a meaning to be identified beyond or under each of the material surfaces that make up the world. What we then call interpretation and hermeneutics are the practice and the theory of such meaning-identification [see Unterwegs 109, 128, 136 for Metaphysics, and 95, 97, 98, 120 for Hermeneutics]. From its very beginning, this critical (Heidegger did not like this word!) impulse in his thinking was complemented by the search for adifferentrelation to the world, a relation to the world that would not be exclusively based on sense production. It is probably for this reason that Heidegger quite frequently mentions, in the Dialogue on Language, how uneasy he feels about the conventional, sense-based concept of language [Unterwegs 123, 126, 137]. Indeed, several passages invite us to imagine a way of referring to the world that would not be sense-related. For example, when asked why he thinks that his own (and very famous) phrase of the language as the house of Being may in the end be an inappropriate concept for his epistemological pursuits, the Inquirer (that is, Heidegger) replies: Because the mode of conceptual representation insinuates itself all too easily into every kind of human experience [25]. How one could avoid positing a conceptual representation of the world as the ultimate form of human experience was no doubt a question that mattered to Heidegger.

2 Neither the dialogic form of Gesprch von der Sprache nor the choice of a Japanese interlocutor is accidental in relation to this question, which is central to the text. Toward
Heidegger didand that means with the conviction that his critique of metaphysics, despite all the intrinsic problems related to this concept, was an important move within the history of Western philosophy.

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the end of their conversation [Unterwegs 14950], the Inquirer suggests that he and the interlocutor have been engaged not in a dialogue about an analysis of language but in an intellectual process that was carried and inspired by language as its basis (ein Sprechen von der Sprache her), that is, by the specific relationship between language and Being. The dialogic form of the text, then, was meant to embody the shift from language as a topic to language as an existential inspiration and resource (as Heidegger might have said). The presence of the Japanese interlocutor, in this specific context, stands for Heidegger s impression of an existing yet concealed affinity (eine tiefverborgene Verwandtschaft) between his own epistemological intuitions and the traditions of Japanese thought [Unterwegs 136]. Many incidents, both in Heidegger s life and in the reception of his work, attest to the existence of complementary feelings on the other side, at least within specific circles of the Japanese intelligentsia. This had also became evident, for example, in the invitation that the otherwise internationally still unknown Heidegger received in 1924, three years before the publication of Sein und Zeit, for an extended stay as a research fellow at the University of Tokyo [see Ott], and, above all, in the lasting importance of his writings for the academic institution of philosophy in Japan.7 That a fascination for Heidegger s style of philosophizing did exist in Japan since his earliest publications is, then, an undeniable fact, and while, at a later stage, Heideggers political sympathies may have become an additional reason for his reception, I think it is fair to say that the philosophical fascination preceded these political sympathies. His success in Japan, however, seems to have motivated an interest in Heideggerperhaps even an interest that is untypical within his intellectual preferencesfor what he imagined to be Japanese culture. This does of course not deny that much of what he referred to as Japanese were phenomena and traditions that should rather be described as typical for Asian cultures at large. From a conceptual point of view, the obvious reason for the philosophical convergence between Heidegger and his admirers in Japan must have been the fascination, felt on both sides, of the notion and the philosophical problem of nothingness and nothingness indeed leads us back to the question regarding the avoidance (or, at least, the minimization) of sense production. For the Asian idea of nirvana, as the following quote taken from a sermon of the Buddha illustrates, is less the idea of a vacuum or an emptiness than the idea of a sphere of fullness in which no distinctions are made, no lines are drawn, no sense is produced: There is a sphere, you monks, where things are neither solid nor fluid, where there is neither heat nor motion, neither this world nor that world, neither sun nor moon. This, you monks, I call neither coming nor going, neither being born nor dying. It is without basis, without development, without support. And this exactly is the end of suffering.8 Quite obviously, the existential desire (or the intellectual task) to experience nirvana or to experience nothingnessas the absence of all distinctions (which condition is synonymous with the absence of all sense and meaning) brings up a paradox. For if experiencing something presupposes the possibility of seeing that something as separated from something else, then experiencing nothingness must be the paradoxical simultaneity of experiencing as nonseparated something which, for being something,

7. For a representative assessment of the importance of Heidegger s philosophy for contemporary Japanese thought, see Keiji Nishitanis Religion and Nothingness. 8. Udana VIII, quoted in Fuchs 49. The following step of my argumentation was quite literally borrowed from Fuchss lucid description of some key structures of Zen-Buddhism.

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needs to be separated from something else. It is the paradoxical simultaneity of something having and not having a form. No hermeneutic surgery [Fuchs 61] can fix this problemin other words: no sense-based experience of the absence of sense is possible. In reaction to this paradox, the Zen tradition has replaced the impossible quest for the meaningful experience of the absence of meaning/sense by a certain style of absurd speech acts which stage the refusal of sense: for example: the Disciple asks what the sense of nothingness is, and the Master answers by verbally pointing to some trivial object in their shared deictic horizon; or, in a switch from verbal to nonverbal interaction, the Master hits the Disciple instead of verbally responding to his impossible question.

3 In contrast to the refreshingly drastic gestures of Zen communication, the Inquirer in Heidegger s dialogue isand Heidegger himself certainly wastoo pompously academic. Far from being treated to the discursive special effects of a non-Western tradition, therefore, the reader of the Gesprch has to witness how Heideggerfor all his lifelong ambition to avoid the image of the typical intellectual and the style of a conventional Professoris struggling, not very successfully, as far as the stylistic quality of his text goes, with the modestly literary (and hence not fully academic) genre of the philosophical dialogue. The decision to represent his own position through the role of an Inquirer (einem Fragenden) seems to come from the most widespread understanding of Socratic wisdom (an Inquirer, by definition, knows that he does not know)whereas the Inquirer s counterpart is barely characterized by his Japanese nationality (ein Japaner), not by any corresponding philosophical or discursive role. This discursive asymmetry between the Inquirer and the Japanese seems to reflect a real-life situation whose memory, according to Heidegger s commentary [Unterwegs 269], was indeed a basis for the Gesprch. This real-life situation was a visit by Tomio Tezuka, a Germanist from the University of Tokyo who, as a non-German Germanist, was doubtlessly eager to please the famous philosopher, then in his mid-sixties. Tomio Tezuka seems have fulfilled all thevery provincialstandard expectations of a German academic toward a far east-Asian (fernoestlich) colleague.9 At one point of the Gesprch [Unterwegs 134], for example, the Inquirer reminds the Japanese, somehow treacherously protecting his own time budget, that the latter s time is limited because he is planning to travel to Florence the following dayupon which the Japanese happily seizes the opportunity to offer an extension of his visit by one more day, if you grant me one further visit to your house. Not surprisingly, the Inquirer never responds and his interlocutor does not dare to insist. The most embarrassing effect in this text, however, from a rhetorical point of viewextremely embarrassing indeed if we keep in mind the identity of the authoris attributed to the Japanese interlocutor, who throughout their conversation produces the impression that the lifeform of all Japanese intellectuals must be an ongoing Heidegger seminar. According to his remarks, transcripts of Heidegger s lecture courses appear to be the only spiritual nourishment in their world; every word that the Master ever said seems to have triggered never fading echoes in the minds of his former students; and these faithful admirers are always ready to defend their idol against potentially ill-meaning enemies: To us, at a distance, it had always seemed amazing that people never tired of imputing to you a negative attitude toward the history of previous thinking, while in fact you strive only for an original appropriation [20].
9. Regarding Tezuka, see the sparse information in Pincus 21, 93.

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If there is a counterpart in the text that the Inquirer/Heidegger finds intellectually worthy and challenging, it is not the Japanese/Tezuka but Count Kuki Shuzo,10 whose figure (perhaps we should rather say: whose shadow) dominatesby direct and detailed referencethe opening sequence of the conversation: Japanese: You know Count Shuzo Kuki. He studied with you for a number of years. Inquirer: Count Kuki has a lasting place in my memory. J: He died too early. His teacher Nishida wrote his epitaphfor over a year he worked on this supreme tribute to his pupil. I: I am happy to have the photographs of Kukis grave and of the grove in which he lies. I: Yes, I know the temple garden in Kyoto. Many of my friends often join me to visit the tomb there. The garden was established toward the end of the twelfth century by the priest Honen, on the eastern hill of what was then the Imperial city of Kyoto, as a place for reflection and deep meditation. [1] Count Kuki will remain a central reference throughout the Dialogue. After some initial hesitation, the Inquirer is easily persuaded by his Japanese interlocutor that one should understand the notion of iki, to which Kuki dedicated a book (first published in 1930, with numerous reeditions: Reflections on Japanese Taste: The Structure of Iki11), as the equivalent of the European concept of the arts and poetry: I: In my dialogues with Kuki, I never had more than a distant inkling of what that word says. J: Later, after his return from Europe, Count Kuki gave lectures in Kyoto on the aesthetics of Japanese art and poetry. These lectures have come out as a book. In the book, he attempts to consider the nature of Japanese art with the help of European aesthetics. [2] Toward the end of their conversation [Unterwegs 138], the Inquirer indeed goes so far as to incorporate the Western tradition of philosophical aesthetics into a now much complexified definition of iki. For his own reflection on iki, the Inquirer had even invoked a particularly inspiring memory of the beautiful visual image of Kukis wife: I: [. . .] The dialogues of which I am thinking came about at my house, like a spontaneous game. Count Kuki occasionally brought his wife along who then wore festive Japanese garments. They made the Eastasian world more luminously present. [. . .] [4] The historical truth seems to have been quite different from this very German-academic portrait of the Far East Asian colleague and his spousebut it is by no means less interesting.12 Born in 1888, one year before Heidegger, Kuki Shuzo was the son of an
10. Kuki is the (noble) family name, Shuzo the first name. Throughout the text, Heidegger disregards the Japanese convention of putting the family name first. 11. This is the title of the first English translation by John Clark, edited by Sakuko Matsui and John Clark (1997). 12. For the following biographical details, I rely on John Clarks introduction to Reflections on Japanese Taste [923], and on Leslie Pincuss Authenticating Culture in Japan [27 ff.]. I am also grateful for advice from my colleagues Thomas Hare (Stanford/Princeton), Christoph Jamme (Lneburg), and from Mr. Tazuke, in Kyoto, who, during the late 1930s was a student of Kuki.

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important intellectual and political protagonist of the Meiji period, the Japanese era of Modernization. His mother was a geisha from Gion, the entertainment district of Kyoto, and this origin may have triggered the secret rumor that Kuki Shuzos biological father was one of his legal father s employees (with whom his mother indeed had an affair). Rumor or tragic love storyKukis mother spent the final decades of her life in the reclusion of a psychiatric institution. Kuki Shuzo himself, after an education whose intellectual orientation was as predominantly Western as it was typical for that moment in Japanese history, came to Europe in 1921, where until 1929 he attended lectures and seminars at the universities of Paris, Heidelberg, and Freiburg, and where he established contacts with philosophers like Bergson and the young Jean-Paul Sartre, Rickert, Husserl, and Martin Heidegger. It is certainly not true, as the Gesprch states in passing, that Kuki studied with Heidegger for several years. Rather, they had just a few encounters and conversations at Freiburg during the spring of 1927, when Heidegger, although he was then still teaching at Marburg, spent his vacations in his former and future hometown. In a note to Husserl, he refers to these conversations with Kuki as an additional burden.13 The complete list of Kukis interlocutors attests to an unfailing instinct that helped him identify who and what was philosophically fashionable during the years of his stay in Europe. The nineteenth-century role of the dandy that he seems to have favored as a model for his nonacademic lifestyle in France, Germany, and even Japan, in contrast, was quite pass by the cultural standards of the 1920s. But dandyism certainly excluded the option of marriage, and there is indeed no record of any Mrs. or Madame Kuki (a diary exists, however, in which Kuki kept a meticulous record of his encounters with countless Parisian prostitutesand their exotic tastes). Not surprisingly, this lifestyle which, for more cosmopolitan eyes than Heidegger s, could have projected an image of Kuki Shuzo as a Japanese brother of Professor Unrat (from Heinrich Mannsand Marlene DietrichsBlue Angel)was not favorable for the progress of his academic career after Kukis return to Japan in 1929. It appears that, among his peers and among his students, Kuki was above all famous for going back and forth, with no detours, between the University of Kyoto and the Gion teahouses. While he was soon appointed to a professorship, his colleagues obviously took him as an outsidera man with an intriguing biography and a spotty academic record. In 1941and without leaving an important body of philosophical writingsKuki died an unheroic death from peritonitis. Not even Kuki Shuzos book on iki, which he wrote, incidentally, during the final years of his stay in Paris, has much to do with the Japanese interlocutors and the Inquirers speculations about his thought. Rather, it belongs to a discourse which, partly as a reaction to the fierce modernization efforts of the Meiji decades in Japan and partly bowing to the dominant political and ideological constellations in the 1930s and 1940s, tried to grasp the essencetoday we would of course say, the identityof the national culture (the name of this discourse is nihhonron). While it is probably fair to say that such a project was neither specifically close to nor particularly far from Heidegger s own interests, a first reading of Reflections on Japanese Taste suggests that the epistemological grounding that Kuki took from the word iki was not only different but indeed opposed to what was at stake in Heidegger s Dialogue: First, what kind of relation does a language have in general to a people? What is the relationship between meaning, which is the content of words, and the being of a people? [. . .] Thus, where the peoples

13. Pincus [58n]. It is true, however, that Kuki Shuzo and Martin Heidegger must have met at a later occasion to which the Gesprch makes no reference. Richard Rorty tells me that he saw a photo of Kuki and Heidegger in an archive at Crisy-la-Salle.

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mode of being is central to [the words], it will appear as a definite meaning and will open up a channel through language [2829]. These sentences are remindful of a certain cultural and linguistic Idealism that was standard in the Literature and Arts departments of German and French universities during that time,14 and, being part of this discourse, Kukis thinking inscribed itself in the metaphysical paradigm that Heidegger was seeking to overcome.15 But while a discussion with Count Kuki about the obsoleteness of the metaphysical paradigm could certainly have occurred, it is more entertainingto say the leastto speculate how this very German philosopher might have reacted had he known that the erotic behavior of geishas was the central topic in Reflections on Japanese Taste; had he known that this book included, for example, an extended (and probably quite competent) analysis and interpretation of the specific kimono dcolletage which reveals the nape of the neck [81]; and that, if the book showed any traces of an impact coming from Kukis conversations with Heidegger, they lay in a passion for etymological speculations which, in their utter disregard of any philological accuracy, were even more breathtaking than Heidegger s own experimentations in this genre: Can we perhaps discover a word which is applicable to iki in French? The word chic first comes to mind. This word is used just as it is in both English and German, and is often translated into Japanese as iki. There are essentially two theories about its derivation. According to one theory it is an abbreviation of chicane, whose original meaning is something like being informed of a clever trick to get someone entangled in a court submission. According to the other theory, Schick is the original form of chic, that is, a German word which came from schicken. Like geschickt it thus had the meaning of ingenuity in all things. [31] Finally, there is considerable comic relief in imagining how the philosopher of the Black Forest fell prey to an intellectual impostor as admirable and as daring as Kuki Shuzo must have been, or in thinking that Frau Kuki, who, as we read, was so welcome in Martins and Elfriedes home, might very well have been a Parisian prostitute dressing as a Japanese noblewoman.

4 On the other hand, to deduce from Heidegger s provincialism and from Kukis lack of academic formality, to deduce from the anecdotes that surround the Dialogue on Language that this text must be a failure as a philosophical experiment and that the mutual intuition of a convergence between Japanese thought and Heidegger s philosophy was an illusion would be to draw conclusions so hermeneutically nave that they would beat even Heidegger s social naivet. Although the Gesprch conveys the impression that, in their actual conversations, Kuki must have shamelessly exaggerated the importance of Heidegger s work for his own and although Heidegger cannot have read Reflections
14. See the chapter on the 1920s in my short book Leo Spitzers Stil. 15. Although Heidegger cannot have read Kukis book (whose first translation appeared as late as 1997), anever fully acknowledgedawareness of the tension between Kukis philosophizing and Heidegger s own epistemological intuitions runs through the Gesprch. It particularly concentrates on Kukis possible misunderstanding (as the Inquirer claims) of the title of a Heidegger Vorlesung from 1921: Ausdruck und Erscheinung (Expression and Appearance) [91]. Ausdruck was one of the terms whose metaphysical understanding the Gesprch was meant to problematize [130].

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on Japanese Taste, some of Kukis observations on iki could have been pertinent for his project of overcoming metaphysics. Above all, it would have been noteworthyin relation to an understanding of nothingness as the absence of distinctions, forms, and meanings, that is, as the simultaneity of everything with everythingthat, throughout his book, Kuki Shuzo is struggling to explain how the style of the geishas displays a simultaneous presence of different qualities which, in their actual appearance, cannot be separated and for which to find descriptive concepts is an even more hopeless undertaking: Iki can be analyzed into individual conceptual moments but we cannot in reverse constitute the being of iki with them. Take coquetry, or self respect, or resignationthese concepts are not part of iki, they are no more than its conceptual moments. For this reason there is an insurmountable gap between the iki as an assembly of conceptual moments and the iki as experiential meaning [113]. In a different chapter, Kuki insists that the geisha style of behavior absorbs and carries numberless couples of opposite concepts (refined vs. unrefined, showy vs. subdued, chic vs. conventional, astringent vs. sweet, and so on [4546]), and he thenquite successfullyproceeds to represent their simultaneity through geometrical figures that connect all those different concepts and features. A differentand equally importantlevel of observation that Kuki himself does not seem to come to terms with produces the impression that all the manifestations of iki, despite their extraordinary complexity, remain strangely nonsubstantial: Iki thus becomes a term like the vague raffin. [. . .] [What if] iki were hypothetically to be something with no more than this sort of vague meaning? [117]. Count Kuki, in his attempts at determining the ontological status of iki, was oscillating between descriptions of iki as sheer material concreteness and other descriptions of iki as a pure phenomenon of consciousness. It is not impossible that Kuki may have talked about this very problem to Heidegger, and that such knowledge was behind the Inquirer s conviction, in the Dialogue on Language, that Kukis concept of iki was trapped inor suffering froma misrepresentation through the Western metaphysical paradigm: I: Kuki [. . .] spoke of sensuous radiance through whose lively delight there breaks the radiance of something suprasensuous. J: With that explanation, I believe, Kuki has hit on what we experience in Japanese art. I: Your experience, then, moves within the difference between a sensuous and a suprasensuous world. This is the distinction on which rests what long has been called Western metaphysics. [14] In reaction to this dialogic moment of disillusionment (where it looks, for a moment, as if Japanese culture could not provide an alternative to the metaphysical paradigm), the Inquirer proceeds, on the following pages, to lay out Heidegger s ideas about a nonmetaphysical mode of experiencing the world. Perhaps these ideas can be tied together as a sequence of three different simultaneity claims.16 The first simultaneity claim is connected to that concept of the two-fold whose explication we had postponed at an earlier stage of our argumentation. The two-fold is the nonmetaphysical simultaneity, the copresence of Being (Sein) and being/beings (Seiendes):

16. The importance that another dialogue about Sein (Zur Errterung der Gelassenheit: Aus einem Feldweggesprch ber das Denken) gives to the verb versammeln confirms the pertinence of the dimension of simultaneity in this context [see esp. 40, 66].

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What [matters] is to bring out the Being of beingsthough no longer in the manner of metaphysics, but such that Being itself will shine out, Being itself that is to say: the presence of present beings, the two-fold of the two in virtue of their simple oneness. [30] Seiendes, as every reader of Heidegger knows, refers to our primary experience of the world, to an experience in which the world always appears as already structured and therefore meaningful (or interpreted). The concept of Sein, in contrast, owes its notorious complexity to a double dedifferentiation, in other words, to the simultaneity of two intrinsic simultaneity effects. Both these dedifferentiations can be read as answers to our initial question, that is to the Zen question, to the antimetaphysical question about the possibility of repressing (or minimizing) sense- and meaning effects in our contact with the world. The first dedifferentiationand the second simultaneity claimis the absence of any distinctions or forms within Sein. This is the type of simultaneity that we mentioned before, in our first attempt to explain the concept of nirvana, or nothingness. Now, the Inquirer/Heidegger indeed defines Sein and nothingness as synonymous concepts, and he adds a third simultaneity claim (a second dedifferentiation): the simultaneity within Sein, the nondistinctness between that which is present and that which is absent. The decisive passage of the Gesprch begins with a reference to the third simultaneity claim: I: That emptiness then is the same as nothingness, that essential being which we attempt to add in our thinking, as the other, to all that is present and absent. J: Surely. [. . .] To us, emptiness is the loftiest name for what you mean to say with the word Being. . . I: . . . in a thinking attempt whose first steps are unavoidable even to this day. It did, however, become the occasion for very great confusion, a confusion grounded in the matter itself and linked with the use of the name Being. For this name belongs, after all, to the patrimony of the language of metaphysics, while I put that word into a title of an essay which brings out the essence of metaphysics, and only thus brings metaphysics back within its own limits. [19 20] It must be emphasized that, beyond the conclusions that we drew in our first discussion of nothingness, the full meaning of the concept of nothingness (nothingness/ Sein, as we now have to add) is not just nondistinctness, nonconceptuality, nonformedness. The concept of Sein also contains the nondistinctness between presence and absence.17 Sein is not a pure absence of dividing lines, that is, an absence of forms and herefore of sense. Sein includes, in addition, the nondistinctness of presence and absence. And because this is the case, the experience of Seinat least in Heidegger s thoughthas to be more than just the appearance of the possibility of a form emerging out of nonformedness. It also needs to be epiphanywhich means it needs to be, together with the appearance of a possibility of form, the appearance of a possibility of presence (which then of course includes the possibility of absence): I: What mattered then, and still does, is to bring out the Being of beings though no longer in the manner of metaphysics, but such that Being itself that is to say: the presence of present beings, the two-fold of the two in virtue
17. Whereas Anwesen[heit] stands for presence and Abwesen[heit] for absence, the word Wesen (essence) seems to point (in most cases at least) to their nondistinctness.

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of their simple oneness. This is what makes its claim on man, calling him to its essential being. [30] This is the systematic place where Heidegger s endeavor of overcoming the metaphysical paradigm (he would of course not have simply spoken of overcoming) meets the more existentialist motifs of his philosophy. Experiencing, keeping, shepherding (according to Peter Sloterdijks interpretation) the two-fold of being (Seiendes) and Being (Sein) in its intrinsic complexity, together with the composure (Gelassenheit) which lets this happen, define human existence (Dasein) and are its destiny. Instead of further pursuing this repertoire of existentialist concepts, however, I will now again focus on the question under which the modalities of Sein can be experienced. This question is important for two obvious reasons. Firstly, because it will help us understand why Heidegger was hoping that certain concepts and thoughts traditionally subsumed under aesthetics could become helpful in developing an alternative to the metaphysical paradigm. Secondly (and especially), because pursuing this question will reveal yet a different level among the affinities between Japanese culture and Heidegger s thinking. Of course, Count Kuki becomes present again in the Dialogue as soon as the Inquirer and the Japanese begin to tackle these issues: J: Meanwhile, I find it more and more puzzling how Count Kuki could get the idea that he could expect your path of thinking to be of help to him in his attempts in aesthetics, since your path, in leaving behind metaphysics, also leaves behind the aesthetics that is grounded in metaphysics. I: But leaves it behind in such a way that we can only now give thought to the nature of aesthetics, and direct it back within its boundaries. J: Perhaps it was this prospect that attracted Kuki; for he was much too sensitive, and much too thoughtful, to concern himself with the calculus of mere doctrines. I: He used the European rubric aesthetics, but what he thought and searched for was something else. . . . [42] What did Heidegger think Kuki Shuzo was searching for? And what was Kuki really interested in? There is one very factual answer to this question. In the more empirical passages of Reflections on Japanese Tastequite removed from his ultimately problematic philosophical interpretationsKuki spends considerable time describing certain gestures that are typical of Japanese geishas and of their grace. This is interesting indeed because Heidegger uses the examples and the concepts of gesture (Gebrde) [104 ff.] and grace (Anmut) [141 ff.], in addition to the concept of the hint (Wink) [117], as part of his ongoing effort to evoke modalities under which we can experience Sein. If Sein, as we have seen, is the site of a simultaneity between three simultaneity moves (of moves that undo distinctions), then the question of how we may be able to experience Sein brings us back, with increased conceptual complexity and intensity, to the question of how we can experience nothingness. But what do grace, gestures, and hints (Heidegger uses this word to evoke certain effects of Being in human expression) have in common? The answer is again threefold. They all show a form. They all arein different waysembodiments of the forms that they show. They are all momentaneous. A way of bringing these three observations together would therefore be to say that grace, gestures, hints, and poetic language are all are instances of the emergence of embodied formsinstances in which the emergence of embodied forms goes together with their vanishing. Yet anothereven more condensedway of saying the same thing is to call

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grace, gestures, hints, and poetic language instances of epiphany. Now, what have such instances of epiphany to do with the possibility of experiencing nothingness and/or Sein? Once we raise this question, it is important to mention that, in the Dialogue, Heidegger refers to man/human existence as seeking and crossing a border: I: Then, man, as the message-bearer of the message of the two-fold s unconcealment, would also be he who walks the boundary of the boundless. J: And on this path he seeks the boundarys mystery. . . . [41] The border evoked here is the border between, on the one side, nothingness/Sein, the realm of multiple nondistinctness, and, on the other side, the world as it appears to Dasein, the world as always already structured, interpreted, and meaningful, the world of the beings (des Seienden). If, basically, the possibility of human experience is limited to the structured, interpreted, meaningful world, then the only possibility of experiencing nothingness/Sein must indeed be a limit experience.18 It must be the experience of the moment, of the event in which the nondistinctness of Seinalmost crosses the border toward the side of form and of the distinction between absence and presence. This would be the moment in which form and embodiment (that is, presence as opposed to absence) begin to manifest themselves. But in order to offer the glimpse of an experience of Sein/nothingness, this experience needs to be limited to a moment (to an event, a hint, a glimpse)because as soon as form and presence/absence are there (or not-there), the impression of nondistinctness has vanished. To see that whatever may be regarded as an experience of Sein has to be this kind of a limit experience makes us understand why yet another type of simultaneity, the simultaneity of emergence (coming forth) and withdrawal, is such an important motif in Heidegger s thought.19 We may describe this point in the form of yet another paradox: whatever we can experience as nothingness/Sein (that is, multiple nondistinctness) needs to cease being nothingness/Sein in order to be experienced. Or, seen from two different but complementary perspectives: in order to experience nothingness/Sein, we need a minimum of sense/meaning; but in order to experience nothingness/Sein, meaning has to be eliminated. The phenomena of epiphanygesture, grace, hint, poetic languageare so fascinating to Heidegger because in all of them the moment of their emergence coincides with the moment of their withdrawal.20 Finally, this explains how Heidegger could hope that aesthetic experienceand for him aesthetic experience was always epiphanic experience, an experience of Sein with specific emphasis on the temporality of this experience, that is, on its specific play of forthcoming and withdrawalmight have particular importance for (the epistemological task of) overcoming the metaphysical paradigm. Aesthetic experience (this seems to have been Heideggers decisive intuition) opens for us the limit experience of Sein, and it thereby belongs to an epistemology that is based on the contrast between nothingness/Sein and the world of
18. There are two reasons why it is problematic to speak of an experience of Sein (and why, in this context, I surround the word experience with quotation marks). The first reason, staged by the Zen paradox, is the impossibility of grasping the nondistinct (Sein) by a mode of world appropriation (experience) that is concept-based. The second reason lies in Sein having substance, not being meant to refer to something purely spiritual (as the concept experience normally does). 19. See Zur Errterung der Gelassenheit, in particular 39, 66. 20. It is obvious how, for the medium of spoken language, this insistence on the simultaneity of emergence and vanishing converges with one aspect of Jacques Derridas critique of logocentrism, developed in his earlier books, that is, the critique of logocentrisms habit of dealing with the sounds of the human voice as if they produced a permanent, nonvanishing present.

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forms, instead of belonging to themetaphysicaldistinction between spirituality and materiality.

5 Only Kuki Shuzo himself could have decided whether Heidegger s speculations about iki as a paradigm for the limit experience of nothingness/Sein had anything to do with his own observations and reflectionsbut he was long dead when Heidegger wrote the Gesprch von der Sprache. At least, we can now understand how and why Heidegger used, in speaking about iki, two (more or less) etymological associations in order to relate Anmut (grace) with Anwesen (presence), and Entzcken (delight) with Entziehen (withdrawal): J: Iki is the breath of the stillness of luminous delight [Entzcken]. I: You understand delight literally, then, as what ensnares, carries away into stillness. J: There is in it nothing anywhere of stimulus and impression. I: The delight is of the same kind as the hint that beckons on, and beckons to and fro. J: The hint, however, is the message of the veiling that opens up. I: Then all presence [Anwesen] would have its source in grace [Anmut], in the sense of the pure delight of the beckoning stillness. [44] This definition of ikior, rather, this way of using some associations around the concept of iki in order to explain his own thinking about the possibilities of experiencing Beingmay have convinced Heidegger, in the process of writing the Gesprch, that he had finally found the right access, the opening, to Japanese culture. For on the following pages the Inquirer asks his Japanese interlocutor to name the most telling concept for the way in which Japanese culture understands the essence of language (the word the interlocutor dutifully comes up with is koto ba)which situation the Inquirer/Heidegger condescendingly uses in order to explain to the Japanese interlocutor his own cultures understanding of language: I: What is the Japanese word for language? J: (after further hesitation) It is Koto ba. I: And what does that say? J: ba means leaves, including and especially the leaves of a blossompetals. Think of cherry blossoms or plum blossoms. I: And what does Koto say? J: [] the pure delight [Entzcken] of the beckoning stillness [], that which in the event gives delight, itself, that which uniquely in each unrepeatable moment [Augenblick] comes to radiance in the fullness of its grace. I: Koto, then, would be the appropriating occurrence [Ereignis] of the lightening message of grace [Anmut]. J: Beautifully said! [. . .] [45] Only the most unconditional admirers of Heidegger will not find embarrassing this concluding (self-)congratulation on his master interpretation of Japanese culture, as only Heidegger addicts will never wish that he had (at least sometimes) dispensed of his etymological speculations. Yet it seems that Heidegger s basic intuition about an affin-

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ity between his own philosophy and a certain Japanese (or, perhaps, generally Asian) conception of thinking the relationship between man and the world was not unfounded (much less unfounded, at least, than we might imagine in light of the anecdotal circumstances of Heidegger s relationship with Kuki)and that this initial intuition about an affinity pushed him into an intellectually productive direction. For it appears21 that the metaphysical distinction between matter (surface) and spirit (depth) only plays a subordinate (if any) role in traditional Japanese culture. What seems to be as central, in Japanese culture, as the metaphysical paradigm is in Western culture, is a distinction between, on the one hand, nothingness (very much in the sense of Heidegger s concept of Sein) and, on the other hand, a sphere of distinctions and forms, of forms that are either absent or present. While it is trivial to insist that the concept of nothingness is more important for any individual Asian culture than for Western culture at large (at least for Western culture in its metaphysical age), the more specific thesis that the concept of nothingness that matters within Japanese culture is nothingness in the sense of Heidegger s Seinthat is, a nothingness that includes the nondistinctness of presence and absencerequires an explanation. In claiming such closeness between some phenomena of Japanese culture and Heidegger s thought, I am relying on the impression that materiality, thingness, and presence (and absence) occupy a place within Japanese culture that is more unconditional and less relative than the place of materiality, thingness, and presence in Western culture. In modern Western culture, the material (the surface) value of signifiers, for example, tends to vanish once we see them in their function as signifiers and thus manage to identify their underlying meaning. In contrast, the importance of calligraphy is proof that things are different in Japanese culture and once again, obviously, not only in Japanese culturewhere the appreciation of writing is largely independent of the meaning that it carries. The same difference becomes manifest in the insight that, within Japanese culture, an interpretation (for example, a cosmological interpretation of the arrangement of the rocks in a Buddhist rock garden) will never completely bracket or even eliminate the impression of the thingness, the presence effect, of those rocks. Rock gardens seem to function simultaneously in two different ways: both as representation of a cosmological meaning to be interpreted and as a material reference for meditation (in which second function they produce epiphany-effects).22 Undoubtedly this may also happen, under certain circumstances, in Western cultureas an ambiguity of reaction or as a structure of oscillation. But instead of being the exception, it seems to be constitutive for Asian culture. There, absence and presence are indeed undivided in this twofold view of the world. Based on the observation that the materiality of things does not seem to vanish in Japanese culture once these things become associated with a meaning (which condition sets them apart form the metaphysical logic of the signifier and the signified), a furthergoing hypothesis may be ventured, now from a more sociological point of view. This hypothesis says that, within Japanese culture (even within modern Japanese culture), the distinction public/private is but marginal in comparison to the distinction pro21. My final reflection, as I readily admit, is merely based on the discussions of a seminar (The Asian Other of Western Culture) that I taught at the Stanford Japan Center at Kyoto during the Spring Quarter 2000 and on a number of essays, written by Japanologists, which we discussed in that course. While I will refrain from invoking any of those disciplinary authorities for the confirmation (or refutation?) of my views, I would like to mention, with gratitude, the encouragement that I received from reading K. Ludwig Pfeiffer s Das Mediale und das Imaginre. 22. This was first explained to me by a Japanese tourist guide, who, after interpreting a rock garden as a representation of the universe, added, as a further aspect of appreciation, that the rocks were delicious in the way that they stayed at their place.

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fane/sacred. The distinction profane/sacred looks like a copy of the distinction between nothingness (or Sein) and form (implying a distinction between present and absent). It enables us to think that the dynamics of culture, within the Japanese context, lie in the never-ending challenge of transforming the profane (the nondistinct) into the sacred (that which has form and is either present or absent). Although this is difficult to accept for Westerners, the nondistinct is always threatening and impure in Japanese culture (forests are inhabited by demons), rather than offering itself as an object of desire (as the pure materiality of nature does under a conception of nature that is typical for Western Romantic and post-Romantic culture). Whatever, in contrast, has been transformed into culturesuch as Japanese gardens, which are ostensibly staged as nature transformed, by human effort and design, into culturewhatever is identified as culture in Japan, indeed exhibits multiple distinctions and dividing lines, distinctions and dividing lines that produce forms together with a strong feeling of the contrast between presence and absence (Japanese gardens never try to look natural). In this context, it would of course be completely inadequate to think that Japanese culture, at large, reduces or even avoids the production of sense. If Japanese culture looks like a nonmetaphysical culture, it is not because it represses the production of sense. The basic difference, rather, lies in the different ways of thinking about and of actually staging sense production. For Japanese culture, producing sense is to transform nothingness into forms; for Western culture, producing sense is interpretation, that is, either to search for and to identify sense in things and humans, and/or to attribute it to them. The most striking observation of cultural otherness, however, lies in the central importance of what I want to call events of epiphany for art and literature in Japan. Japanese art and literature constantly create scenes where something material comes to the fore (and vanishes), gaining (or losing) form and presence in the process. This is what I mean by events of epiphany. With our Heidegger interpretation in mind, we can now speculate that, as events of epiphany, art and literature in Japan are, to a large extent, engaged in providing the specific experience of nothingness/Sein. In the two classical staging traditions of Japanese culture, No and Kabuki, such moments of emergence (and withdrawal) are decisive, and are highly appreciated by the audience. No and Kabuki actors enter and leave the scene by crossing a bridge that leads through the audience to the stageand the mixed presence/absence situation of their entries and exits, of their emergence and vanishing, often lasts longer than their actual presence on the stage and within a plot.23 Synchronized, in No theater, with the (for Western ears) monotonous beat of two types of archaic drums, the actors bodies seem to gain form and presence as they are coming forth from under a curtain and approach the stage; and they seem to undo this presence and this form when they slowly withdraw. The demons, who normally take even more time to come to the stage than the human personae, seem to stand between having a form and just being profane nondistinctness. Once they reach the stage, they can become all kinds of human bodies and human rolesbut whenever the plot wants them to remain demons, their appearance tends to undo such forms. Then their hair looks wild and exuberant; and while the rhythm of their movements is difficult to catch, their eyes are neither closed nor open, and their tongues stick out. Theirs, we can imagine, is a version of the face of Being and nothingness. Kabuki theater, in addition to the coming forth of the personae, produces a specific impression of the two-fold, of the simultaneity of being and Being, as we can now call it. When male actors of considerable age embody young girls or geishas, their goal is by no means to produce a perfect, so to speak, seamless illusion. On the contrary
23. The most expensive tickets for Kabuki performances are those close to the middle of this bridge.

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and here lies a point of convergence with the self-staging of Japanese gardensit is very important in Kabuki theater that the spectators be able to perceive and appreciate the simultaneity of (and also the potential tension between) an old mans body and the gestures (and high-pitched articulation) of a young female body to which the actor s body lends itself as a form. This copresence of incommensurable elements will evoke a specific sphere of nondistinctness between male and female, old and young. A third (and final) aspect where Japanese literature seems to meet Heidegger s epistemology has to do with what one might refer to as extreme temporalities, as the suddenness and shortness of the moment in which Sein approaches the threshold that separates it from the world of distinctions. It also has to do with the suddenness24 and shortness of Seins hints to human existence. We may read Japanese haikus, those small texts which, at first glance, look like minimalistic pomes en prose, along the lines of Heidegger s observation about the simultaneity of grace and delight (Anmut and Entzcken), emergence and withdrawal. Almost invariably, the content of haikus invokes the event of an emergence, of an emergence, however, whose material effects are bound to vanish while they appear (like the material effects of a sudden sound or of lightning). Such scenes of simultaneous emergence and vanishing evoked by the content of the haikus will double the sound impression which any recitation produces. Some haikus stage a suddenness that is strictly object-related: I come by the mountain path. Ah! This is exquisite! A violet! Others give an explicitly allegorical status to the effects of suddenness: How admirable it is / Who does not think Life is ephemeral / when he sees a flash of lightning!25

6 Now, should the impression be correct that some of the concepts that Heidegger develops in the Dialogue on Language are quite adequate for the description of Japanese culture, this would mean that there is something uncanny about this case. In an intellectual climate where, ever since the reception of Edward Saids Orientalism (and for good reasons), we have become skeptical about the possibility of understanding any culture but ones own, how can we possibly accept that somebody as provincial as Heidegger, somebody as culturally blind as Heidegger to anything outside his self-made GrecoGermanic niche, that this Black Forest tourist got Japanese culture rightalthough he profoundly misunderstood the one concept (iki) that he ever really focused on? To attribute this hermeneutic miracle to Heidegger s genius or to the superior intellectual powers of his philosophy would be nothing but intellectual laziness. The case is more interesting than thatand it indeed becomes a case in relation to a more general situationas another eminent Western intellectual, Roland Barthes, who in his book Lempire des signes (first published in 1970) also got Japanese culture right, although, as in Heidegger s case, all the premises with which he approached it were wrong. When Roland Barthes went on a lecturing tour in Japan, during the late 1960s, he still considered himself a semiotician, but we know, from his subsequent work, that Barthes was about to abandon that paradigm. As the title of his book on Japan suggests, he must have traveled to Japan with the idea that this country would be more semiotic, more readable within the binary logic of signifier and signified, than Western culture. Chapter by

24. I am alluding here to Karl Heinz Bohrer s discussion of Pltzlichkeit as a central aesthetic category. 25. Quoted, with one modification in the second text, from The Empire of Signs [71 ff.], the English translation of Roland Barthess Lempire des signes.

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chapter, however, Barthes was sincere enough to discuss his reiterated impression that Japanese culture somehow rejected this logic. He was particularly impressed, in this sense, by his discovery that Japanese faces did not express states of the mind, of the psyche, or even of the soul. Commenting on the early twentieth-century photographs of a Japanese admiral and his wife, taken the day before their joint suicide, Barthes writes: Ils vont mourir, ils le saventet cela ne se voit pas [12425] (They are going to die, they know itand this is not seen [9293]). Is there a secret condition of success that Barthess and Heidegger s approaches to Japanese culture sharebeyond the inadequate status of their hermeneutic premises? Less visible than Heidegger s deliberate, almost ideological provincialism and the provincialism of the only apparently cosmopolitan intellectual from Paris is the double biographical (and doubly random) fact that they were both in the process of taking distance from their own Western, dominant cultural paradigm in the very situations of their lives during which they approached Japanese culture. To overcome Western metaphysics had definitely become a programmatic goal for Heidegger s philosophizing by the early 1950s; Roland Barthes had begun a (self-)critical revision of his semiotic theories around 1970. In both cases, suchrelative and perhaps only transitorydistance towards paradigms that centrally belong to Western culture seems to have produced an openness toward theJapaneseOther. Paradoxically, this openness was not a part of Heidegger s or of Barthess programmatic intentions for this encounter. Rather than a deliberate opening toward the other culture, their attitude was that of an insecurity within their own intellectual paradigms. This (half-)distance, this lack of security within their own paradigm, seems to have triggered an increased readiness to revise certain premises about the foreign culture and even to apply such revisions to the relationship that Heidegger and Barthes entertained with their own German and French cultures. To use a concept from Claude Lvi-Strauss, who was so immensely popular in the intellectual sphere that Heidegger and Barthes inhabited: it was a half-distance vis-vis their own culture which encouraged Heidegger and Barthes to engage in a style of intellectual practice that we call bricolage. Half-distance and bricolage may indeed be better premises for the understanding of the Other than those methods (toujours rigoureuses) of which we used to dream during the years in which our perennial inferiority complex as humanists had brought us under the spell of the social sciences.

WORKS CITED Barthes, Roland. The Empire of Signs. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982. Trans. of Lempire des signes. Genve: Skira, 1970. Bohrer, Karl Heinz. Das absolute Prsens: Die Semantik sthetischer Zeit. Frankfurt/ Main: Suhrkamp, 1994. ________ . Pltzlichkeit: Zum Augenblick des sthetischen Scheins. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1981. Fuchs, Peter. Vom Zweitlosen: Paradoxe Kommunikation im Zen-Buddhismus. Reden und Schweigen. Ed. Niklas Luhmann and Peter Fuchs. 4649. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. Leo Spitzers Stil. Kln: Naur, 2001. Hahn, Alois. Sinn und Sinnlosigkeit. Sinn, Kommunikation und soziale Differenzierung: Beitrge zu Luhmanns Theorie sozialer systeme. Ed. Hans Haferkamp and Michael Schmid. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1987. 15564. Heidegger, Martin. A Dialogue on Language between a Japanese and an Inquirer. On the Way to Language. Trans. Peter D. Hertz. New York: Harper and Row, 1971. 1 54. Trans. of Aus einem Gesprch von der Sprachezwischen einem Japaner und einem Fragenden. Unterwegs zur Sprache. Pfullingen: Neske, 1959. 83155.

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. Zur Errterung der Gelassenheit: Aus einem Feldweggesprch ber das Denken. Gelassenheit. Pfullingen: Neske, 1959. Kuki Shuzo. Reflections on Japanese Taste: The Structure of Iki. Trans. John Clark. Ed. Sakuko Matsui and John Clark. Sydney: Power, 1997. Luhmann, Niklas. On the Concepts Subject and Action. Social Systems. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995. 3752. Luhmann, Niklas, and Peter Fuchs. Reden und Schweigen. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1989. Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Birth to Presence. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1993. Nishitani, Keiji. Religion and Nothingness. Trans. and intro. Jan Van Bragt. Berkeley: U of California P, 1982. Ott, Hugo. Martin Heidegger: Unterwegs zur seiner Biographie. Frankfurt/Main: Campus, 1988. Pfeiffer, K. Ludwig. Das Mediale und das Imagin re: Dimensionen kulturanthropologischer Medientheorie. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1999. Pincus, Leslie. Authenticating Culture in Imperial Japan: Kuki Shuzo and the Rise of National Aesthetics. Berkeley: U of California P, 1996. Vattimo, Gianni. Beyond Interpretation: The Meaning of Hermeneutics for Philosophy. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997.

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