Heidegger on the Way from Onto-Historical Ethnocentrism to East-West Dialogue

デービス ブレット[著], 酒詰 悠太[訳]Some scholars may still wish to debate whether Heidegger was the greatest Western philosopher of the twentieth century. Most all will agree, however, that among those who make the short list for this distinction, Heidegger not only committed the most egregious political error but also, at least in the 1930s, was the most unabashedly ethnocentric thinker of the lot. Heidegger often asserted that Germany, as "the land of poets and thinkers, " had a central world-historical role to play in any possible recovery from the technological nihilism of the modern epoch. And yet, it is also arguably the case that, among the greatest of twentieth century Western philosophers, Heidegger demonstrated the most sincere and sustained interest in clearing the way for a radical dialogue with East Asian thought. East Asian students and scholars were among the first to show interest in his work, and he reciprocated by conversing with them and reading translations of texts from the Daoist and Zen traditions in particular. "From a Conversation on Language (1953/54): Between a Japanese and an Inquirer" is not only a noteworthy indication of this interest, it is also widely acknowledged as one of his most important texts. The ensuing question that I pursue in this article is this: How are Heidegger's entrenched ethnocentrism and his profound interest in East-West dialogue related? Whileneither can be wholly confined to one or another period in his thought, I will show how, starting in the late 1930s, Heidegger begins to recover from the most ethnocentric period of his thought, and how he starts thinking of his reflections on the Western history of being as a preparation for what in 1953 he came to call "the inevitable dialogue with the East Asianw orld.