“Authentic Selfhood”

Abstract

This was what Heidegger said to his Japanese enquirer in A Dialogue on Language, which, however, concluded on a note bespeaking much more of convergence than of divergence. Yet the difficulties which lie in any com parative study of two thinkers belonging to such distinct and independent traditions as Heidegger and Wang Yang-ming remain great and many. First of all, as Heidegger himself pointed out, we have the language hurdle. Chinese as well as Japanese lacks a clear verb to be; the Chinese language in particular organizes its uninflected words solely according to word order and the placing of particles. Such a language seems to defy logical analysis and forbids an exact translation of the term, Being. How is common ground to be found in such a case? And yet, for anyone who reads more than superficially into the philosophical writings of the two thinkers, separated as they are by time and distance as well as an apparently insurmountable cultural gap, the sense of basic compatibility is definitely present. Heidegger's increasing use of metaphorical and paradoxical statements in later life, including his ex ploratory discussion on the ground of identity between Being and non-being (Being crossed out), tends to confirm this sense. In A Dialogue on Language, the Japanese enquirer made reference to this point also. And cer tainly, Heideggerian philosophy has received ready welcome in those parts of East Asia which are not dominated by Marxist governments. It is in yielding to this tantalizing sense of basic compatibility, and for the sake of testing it systematically, that I am writing this paper. I am en titling this study, Authentic Selfhood, in order to focus attention on a cer tain conception of the self which I consider to be shared by our two philosophers. But I shall proceed from the general to the specific, moving from a more global, structural comparison to the selected focus of considera tion.