Everyday Life and Ultimate Reality: Dialectical Reversals in Hegel, Heidegger and Buddhism

Abstract

Buddhism relentlessly exposes the impermanent, painful, and insubstantial character of all phenomena, but it ends up reinstating the conventional samsaric world as the place where nirvanic emptiness can be encountered and where compassion can be skilfully exercised. In Hegel and Heidegger one also finds dialectical reversals that bring a positive result from the ordeal of the negative. In Heidegger, the encounter with nothingness in anxiety brings a discovery of the phenomenon of being. In Hegel, the dialectical self-dissolution of received metaphysical notions generates a positive method of grasping the real. Heidegger's meditative thinking has an affinity with Hegel's Concept, in that both free the mind from the painfully constricted forms of metaphysics. Heidegger is also near to Daoism when he grounds the clarity of logical thought in a more obscure, originary kind of thought, and when he characterises the movement of thinking, at this more originary level, as a ‘way.’ All four dialectical paths reveal their vitality, in reciprocal critique, when rooted in the human quest to bring the everyday into connection with ultimate meaning.