Feng Dong reviews Heidegger and Dao

Eric S. Nelson. Heidegger and Dao: Things, Nothingness, Freedom. New York: Bloomsbury, 2024. 253 pp.

6 June 2025

Scholars have long suspected the influence of Daoism on Martin Heidegger’s philosophy. To what extent did this arcane Oriental source reorient and reshape Heidegger’s later thinking on being, nothingness, and things? Answering this question requires a careful cross-cultural investigation that orchestrates an eventful meeting between the East and West regarding the question of being. Focusing on the prospects of the “other beginning” anticipated by Heidegger in the 1930s, Eric Nelson’s book offers a compelling account of Heidegger’s transition from Dasein analysis to reflections on Ereignis (event) and Seyn (beyng) as largely prompted by the notion of dao, the way.

Notably, Heidegger’s thinking in the 1930s was imprinted with a sense of historical violence and the uncanniness of human existence; in the 1940s, he resorted increasingly to the notion of Gelassenheit: to let things be and thereby gather a site for humans to dwell in an already-destroyed world. Earlier on, through Richard Wilhelm and Martin Buber’s translations of Lao-Zhuang texts, Heidegger might have already incorporated some Daoist thought-images such as the hiddenness (mystery) of the way into the early drafts of “On the Essence of Truth” (1930). More broadly, Nelson argues in this book that there is a “quasi- or semi-Daoist turn” or “ziranist-informed turning” in Heidegger, ziran meaning “self-so” (pp. 3, 105). Nelson points out that 1943 marks this turning point when Heidegger quoted Daodejing in his essay “The Uniqueness of the Poet” to illustrate the use of nonbeing/emptiness for human dwelling.[1] Heidegger’s absorption of Daoist ideas like “noncoercive action” (wuwei) and “beinglessness” (wuyou) also “help[ed] therapeutically undo hypostatization in his own thinking” that adhered to ontological bifurcations of being and beings, being and nothingness (p. 52).

Dao as the undivided One is not just logos or physis but comprises both; lacking a name and image, it can only be provisionally spoken of. Filtered through European reception in the 1920s, the Daoist source gives Heidegger a language, a path, to overcome what he considers the enframing or positioning (Gestell) of the modern world. Much of Nelson’s book traces how Daoist insights find expression or response in Heidegger’s later writings. For example, a key Heideggerian notion, das Geviert—the fourfold of earth, sky, humans, and divinity—might be inspired by Daodejing 25 where Laozi says there are “four great things” within the realm: man, earth, sky, and dao, and each patterns itself on the next while dao corresponds to ziran, the self-so (p. 45). Heidegger’s Geviert responds to the Daoist cosmos where humans and things are released into the spontaneous and noncoercive realm; in Nelson’s reading, this represents a case of “sympoiesis” or co-making in the in-between, the “open” that grounds human freedom (p. 42).

Transcending a reception study or a narrowly defined comparative study, Nelson’s book asks how one tradition (pathway) of thinking traverses the theoretical predicament—or even dead end—of another tradition and leads the latter to an unexpected unfolding of its own essence, a place and moment of its clearing. It is rare to see a study equally versed in both Heideggerian and Oriental philosophy capable of cross-culturally tackling such difficult concepts—because they are deceptively similar—as Daoist emptiness, Buddhist sunyata, and Heidegger’s das Nichts. Regarding the challenge of nihilism (pessimism in Arthur Schopenhauer and self-willing in Friedrich Nietzsche), Heidegger advocates an understanding of nothing that reveals to us something critical about the totality of beings, which is self-concealed under various epochal organizations. Nelson explains, “The nothingness of nihilism is not overcome by turning to forms of affirmation, presence and positivity that fixate and reify beings. It requires moving toward the abyssal nothingness of being in which affirmation and negation, absence and presence, concealment and unconcealment emerge and in which their varying historical configurations are fixated and hold sway” (p. 160). We should note that although Heidegger wants to return to the empty site where “varying historical configurations” emerge, he would not reduce those configurations to the play of vital, elemental forces (aggregates) as in Daoism and Buddhism. For Heidegger, the overcoming of nihilism is intrinsic to the question of being, just as the forgetting of being constitutes the unfinished history of Western metaphysics. However, as Nelson points out toward the end of the book, Heidegger’s nothingness, which leads to being, appears “partial and limited” in contrast with “absolute nothingness” insisted by the Kyoto School, which seeks to empty all positions and views (p. 175).

Retrospectively, Heidegger’s seeming appropriation of Daoist-inflected thought-figures in his postwar writings can be taken as a strategy to tone down and, in a sense, compensate for his voluntarist political views in the 1930s. The Daoist emphasis on the importance of the useless and the unnecessary, the empty and the void, may evoke a particular kind of self-mockery for Heidegger after the war (he was investigated for his Nazi affiliations and suspended from teaching for nearly five years). In the German word Gelassenheit, one hears Heidegger’s desire to be released from his political past. After the destruction of the war, all must be rethought and questioned. As Nelson reiterates in the book, what attracts Heidegger most in Daoist thinking is perhaps its caring for things, its anarchic, noncoercive politics, and the self-nurturing way of life it brings about—all relevant to his later meditations on being’s openness and releasement. For Heidegger, the other beginning of philosophy might just mean this gesture of waiting for a healing, whiling (weilen) in the interval, and receiving hints about truths of being from other traditions.

[1] See Martin Heidegger, “Die Einzigkeit des Dichters,” Zu Hölderlin–Griechenlandreisen, ed. Curd Ochwadt (Frankfurt am Main, 2000), pp. 33–44.