Dao of Dasein Final Draft (Image Update)

DAO OF DASEIN A History of the Way of Being, 1893-1968 A Thesis Presented to The Division of History and Social Sciences Reed College In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Bachelor of Arts Ahmed Moharram Kabil May 2011 Approved for the Division (History) Benjamin Lazier Acknowledgments Mom and Dad, there’s you, and then there’s everyone else. So you get the top spot. As the years pass I realize how fortunate I am to have had nothing but love and support from the two of you. Thank you. And Hemaki, dearest brother, wise sage, kind buddha, thank you too. So often my notions of ‘these things’ felt contrived, and in those moments I always knew I could turn to you for your spontaneous, pure and genuine understanding. The inspiration for this thesis came from several sources: I was serendipitously assigned readings of Heidegger and Zhuangzi at the same time in two different classes (later learning Zhuangzi was one of Heidegger’s principal albeit secret influences); an email from Stewart Brand, where I read the name Frederic Spiegelberg for the first time after asking who showed him the Way; Benjamin Lazier’s Whole Earths and World Pictures classes, in which we applied Heidegger’s theories to Brand’s example without being aware of the deeper historical and philosophical connections; and my experience of the altered states Reed has kindly bestowed upon me, from the throes of beatific rapture to the secret blessings of bad trips to all the illusory highs and lows to the open space of meditative zazen. So thank you, Ken Brashier and Ben Lazier for assigning Zhuangzi and Heidegger. (I always liked how the two professors’ names looked in print next to each other, hinting in lovely fashion at their contrasting East-West orientations). Another thanks to Ken for the secret books you lent me (I’ll return them, I promise!). And another thanks to Ben for those Whole Earths classes; they changed my life in ways you’ll never know. Furthermore, you always believed in my crazy ideas when I didn’t, so thanks for that. Thank you, Stewart Brand, for all your prompt responses and, well, unknowingly giving me the idea for this thesis by dropping Frederic Spiegelberg’s name. I imagine you’re in a tough spot of sorts these days, coming to Reed extolling the virtues of nuclear technology only to have a 9.0 earthquake strike Japan the next day. But I still believe in you! Stay hungry, stay foolish! Thank you, Reed College, even if at times you’re just an idea in my head that I love to death, you still come to life in moments as I walk around and delight in your secret history (sans the eugenics bit) and beautiful trees and buildings. Look! That’s the spot in the canyon where Lew Welch made it with Betsey! And dig, over yonder, that’s where Lloyd Reynolds’ sign used to hang! Oh, and thank you to the tree near the Gray Campus Center that looks like it’s melting. It functioned as the spark in the fall of 2006 that started this long strange trip. And thank you to whoever made it so that I could fulfill my PE requirement by going to Jogen’s Zen Mind classes. Peter Wills, dear Hofuku, thanks for suggesting we have cups of tea when I try too hard to talk about the dharma. Bahman Shirazi, thank you for providing me with so many of the crucial documents that made this thesis possible, for being so consistently helpful and accommodating, and for offering such a supportive environment for me to give my first lecture. Evan Dawley, thank you for your close eye and very helpful suggestions. Amy Goldsmith, thank you for those lovely adventures in the Bay. Natasha Wright, thank you for translating all that stuff about Being, God, and she-demons. Thank you Stanford Archives for dealing with my unreasonable demands. And thank you, Reed College Archives, for allowing me to sit and stare in wide-eyed wonder at Jack Kerouac’s drunken typewriter ramblings and the Reed poets’ delicately rice-papered calligraphy. Oh, what a life! Ah, one last thing, ‘cause I have to: Research for this study was supported by a Reed College Undergraduate Research Initiative Grant. Preface: The Butterfly Koan1 Around 2,300 years ago, the Daoist sage Zhuangzi dreamed he was a butterfly. Spirits soaring, he was a butterfly, and he didn’t know about Zhuangzi. But when he awoke, there he was, Zhuangzi again, “with all his wits about him.” Was he Zhuangzi dreaming he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuangzi? “Between Zhuangzi and the butterfly there was necessarily a dividing,” he reasoned. “Just this is what is meant by the transformation of things.”2 *** In 1946, Martin Heidegger met with Paul Shih-yi Hsiao in the ruins of Freiburg by the Black Forest to discuss their secret translation of the Daode Jing. Heidegger had recently suffered a nervous breakdown in the oftentimes-difficult de-Nazification proceedings. “Mr. Hsiao,” he began. “What would you say if people made two contradictory assertions about the same piece of writing of yours?” Hsiao was caught off-guard. “How is it possible?” Heidegger asked. “The Nazis said of a section of my book Being & Time: ‘Herr Heidegger, from what you have written in your book here it is clear that you are not Aryan.’ And now your allies, the French, have presented me with the same passage and said: ‘Herr Heidegger, from what you have written in your book here it is clear you are a Nazi.’ You see, Mr. Hsiao, what different effects the same passage from the same book can produce. What do you say to that?” After some silence, a passage from Mencius, the greatest Confucian philosopher after Confucius himself, came to Hsiao’s mind. “Professor Heidegger, you ask me what I say to the statements of the Nazis and the Allies. I can only give you a Chinese answer. I find that the surely false interpretations of the Nazis and the Allies attest to the same thing: in the future one must study your philosophy more assiduously and carefully. If it is understood properly, it will have great relevance for the future. Mencius said: ‘If heaven wants to impose a difficult task on someone, it first fills his heart and will with bitterness, rots his sinew and bones, starves his frame, and imposes great poverty upon his body, and confounds his undertakings, so that his heart will be inspired, his nature stimulated and his deficiencies remedied…From all these things we learn 1 From Zen Buddhism, a koan is a story, phrase, or question whose meaning cannot be understood rationally but may be grasped through intuition. 2 A.C. Graham, Zhuangzi: The Inner Chapters (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001), 61. that life arises out of anxiety and care, misery and privation; and that death on the other hand is the product of comforts and pleasure.” According to Hsiao, Heidegger was “quite moved” by the quotation.3 *** In February 1966, Stewart Brand sat on a roof in San Francisco’s North Beach, feeling bummed and purposeless now that Ken Kesey’s band of Merry Pranksters headed towards Mexico and seeming oblivion with sheriffs hot on their trail. “In those days,” Brand recalled, “the standard response to boredom and uncertainty was LSD followed by grandiose scheming. So there I sat, wrapped in a blanket in the chill afternoon sun, trembling with cold and inchoate emotion, gazing at the San Francisco skyline, waiting for my vision. The buildings were not parallel – because the Earth curved under them, and me, and all of us; it closed on itself. I remembered that Buckminster Fuller had been harping on this at a recent lecture – that people perceived the Earth as flat and infinite, and that that was the root of all their misbehavior. Now from my altitude of three stories and one hundred miles, I could see that it was curved, think it, and finally feel it. But how to broadcast it?” Scribbled in his journal entry for that day was the answer, in the form of a question: “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole earth yet?” A few months later at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, after a blistering campaign selling pins that posed the fateful question on college campuses across the country, Brand penned the following poem: we owe to electricity that all of earth are now in critical proximity we become aware of the mandala of our collective self twirling in the 3 Paul Shih-yi Hsiao, “Heidegger and the Daode Jing” in Heidegger and Asian Thought (Honolulu: U of Hawaii P, 1987) 93-6. light. like innumerable caterpillars about to become one butterfly. many of us dread the dark paradox of metamorphosis. yet discernible already are the crumpled beginnings of bright wings.4 Is this what is meant by the transformation of things? 4 Journal entry (23 June 1966), Stewart Brand Papers (M1237). Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, Calif. A Note on Translation and Compromises First off, I must make clear that I speak neither Chinese nor German, and I can’t read Sanskrit. Hence, the level of analysis regarding certain of my claims of cross-cultural pollination must necessarily be superficial. And though I’ve studied Chinese humanities for two years, I am by no means an authority; in moments where further explication on certain Daoist, Hindu or Buddhist terms is necessary, I defer in the footnotes to higher authorities.

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