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Phenomenology Beyond the Spirit of Revenge Kah Kyung Cho. Bewusstsein und Natursein. Phänomenologischer West-Ost Diwan. Freiburg und München: Karl Alber, 1987. 360 pp. The subtitle of Professor Kah Kyung Cho's book gives the reader a better idea than the title of what to expect. In his West-istlicher Divan Goethe, like the Arab and Persian poets he was emulating, used "Divan" to refer to a collection of poems, poems he intended to lead poetry beyond European parochialism and to give voice to the universally human. This is a similar collection; to be sure, not of poems: this "divan" is a work of philosophy, a collection of essays in the phenomenological tradition written between 1967 and 1988. But if so, it is equally a work that calls that tradition and its logocentric presuppositions into question. To address the crisis faced by Western culture, Cho enters into a thoughtful confrontation of Western and Eastern thought. As a Korean who, while deeply committed to Taoism, yet also demonstrates an extraordinary command of the phenomenological tradition-Lowith, Gadamer, and especially Landgrebe deserve to be sin- gled out as his mentors-Cho is in a singular position to accomplish what he has set out to do. Having taught at the State University of New York in Buffalo ever since 1970, he knows very well the technological culture that is the subject of his reflections. I only hope that the author's unusual placement between the Korean, the German, and the American philosophical com- munities will not prevent this thoughtful book from receiving the attention it deserves. Committed to a phenomenological approach, yet keenly aware of the shortcomings of traditional phenomenology, Professor Cho has a unique contribution to make to its further development. As Cho emphasizes, if there is one thinker who has shaped the progress of his own reflections, it is Martin Heidegger. Taken together, the essays collected in this volume may indeed be understood as an attempt to appro- priate and deepen Heidegger's Kehre or "reversal." To call for such a reversal is to presuppose that Western culture and more especially Western meta- physics as its spiritus rector have been travelling in the wrong direction, that the path we have been following has led us into a dead end. Following Nietzsche's and Heidegger's example, Cho attempts to take a step beyond this entire tradition. But while for them this took the form of a return to the Pre-Socratics, for Cho it becomes a step from West to East. Cho looks to Lao-Tzu for that wisdom of which Heidegger found traces in the work of 275 276 REVIEW ARTICLES Heraclitus or Anaximander. This turn from Western metaphysics to the wisdom of the East is at the same time a turn from a philosophy of consciousness to a philosophy of nature, where Heidegger's wrestling with the meaning of the Greek phusis invites comparison with Taoist reflections. Dreams of journeys to the East are of course nothing new in Western philosophy. Heidegger's conversation with a Japanese in On the Way to Language invites such a journey, although one has to agree with Cho, that judged as a conversation this particular attempt to confront the world- experience of the East is quite dilettantish and disappointing: what is confronted seems little more than an image projected by Heidegger's own thought (cf 95n). Cho points instead to the profound affinity that links Heidegger's Gelassenheit and Lao-Tzu's wu-wei: both suggest a state of mind that has renounced every will to power, that understands the human being, not as the measure of things, but as in need of finding his measure and center in nature, which "without word and busy activity" does everything "in perfect order" (91). "Both thinkers, regardless of their different historical situations, begin with the disturbance of the original order of Being in the present age. Both trace the decadent appearance of their epoch to the forgetfulness of what always eludes consciousness and yet is everywhere and also supports human existence. Heidegger calls it Anwesen (presencing), opposing it to the object of representational experience. Lao-Tzu speaks of the real or natural Tao, as distinct from the human" (95-96). Where Heidegger speaks of the forgetfulness of Being, Lao-Tzu speaks of the loss of Tao. Not that human beings have lost their memories or neglected to cultivate the sciences: "Quite the opposite, the great untruthfulness (so literally Lao-Tzu) and delusion (so literally Heidegger) of human beings has its root in the effort to master nature through knowledge and artifice" (96). In often moving passages, laced with quotes by Heidegger and Lao-Tzu, Cho calls into question the willful self-assertion that has shaped the progress of our modern culture. Only a new humility, the emergence of what we can call a post-modern ethos, will allow us to recover in nature our lost home. Cho himself calls attention to the difficulty inherent in such advice: how are we to recover lost simplicity? Is not such recovery something that by its very nature cannot be willed, but become our own, if at all, only as an inexplicable gift? How are we to effect the reversal without falling back, by the very willfulness of any such attempt, into the very self-assertion that was to be overcome? Faced with this problem, Cho suggests, Heidegger could not have found a better master than Lao-Tzu, to whom he did in fact turn, working his way through different translations of the Tao-te-ching, even if such reading left few explicit traces in the published works (90, 95, 292). And that we, too, would do well to learn from the Chinese sage is a recurrent suggestion in these essays. Still, Cho has difficulty giving much content to .

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