Abstracts

What Happens to the Question of Being with the Rise of Generative AI?

The significant boom of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) during this decade has seen the proliferation and widespread use of chatbots like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Copilot, as well as image and video generators like DALL-E, Firefly, and Sora. A subset of Artificial Intelligence, GenAI is based on large language models that allow users to create new content such as images, videos, sound, speech, music, graphic design and even works of art. Yet while this breakthrough in technology opens unlimited possibilities for human productivity and creativity, Generative AI provokes us to reawaken once again and with more urgency the question Heidegger raised in Being and Time a hundred years ago: what does it mean to be, what is a being, and how must we human beings exist? The paper contends that questions regarding the falsity or reality, originality and authenticity of generated content, while inescapable, still fail to face the profound primacy of Heidegger’s Question of Being (Seinsfrage)—and even forgets it all over again in what appears to be the final stage of the history of metaphysics: the age of the will to will which now bears the face of Artificial Intelligence. Now more than ever, we are challenged to think of what comes after the end of metaphysics, and what it still means to be when anything can be. 

Disembodied Being-in-the-World in the Age of AI? Reflections on the Significance of the Sentimental Body as an Absent Presence in Heidegger’s Thought

Heidegger and the body—a complicated relationship. While the body is otherwise accorded essential significance within the tradition of phenomenology, in Heidegger’s work it is shrouded in silence—indeed, one could almost say it is invisible or haunts his philosophy like a specter. But, as is often the case with Heidegger when it comes to the invisible and the self-evident connections, what he remains silent about is precisely what is important, precisely what grounds meaning, and which, in its formal absence, makes itself all the more vividly felt—and so it is with the body. For: Being-in-the-world as being-thrown into a world pre-opened to meaning cannot be conceived without the body even in Heidegger; after all, the body enters into Being-in-the-world as an essential pillar—as the hidden precondition for every behavior in the world and, more precisely, through its sensibility, as the hidden precondition for every meaningful behavior in the world. I do not think Heidegger would or could disagree with that. Of course, the body is not to be conceived here as an instrument that primarily fulfills certain external purposes and functions, but rather, precisely in its dimension as an end in itself, as a sentimental, spontaneous moment that paves the way for a deep, qualitative experience of the world as self-meaning, beyond the lens of the merely ontic as merely utilitarian. The body as a sentimental body is the root of every self-contained experience of meaning, in which considerations of utility, specific indication, and practical manipulation recede, and the truth of being comes to light. This physical being-in-the-world faces particular challenges today: In the form of large-language models, AI transforms being-in-the-world into a disembodied being-in-the-world, in which the body is not invisible in the sense of a formal indication, but has become passive, functionalized, indeed an abstract generality rather than the generality of an individual existence. The lecture explores these lines of inquiry with a view to reflecting on the meaning-conveying and self-referential sentimentality of the body. 

Where Word Breaks Off: Heidegger, George, and Weil on Language and Renunciation in the Age of AI

In his 1950s lectures, Heidegger warned that humanity’s attempt to dominate language drives human nature into alienation, insisting that the call of language remains “the highest and everywhere the first.” Decades before the advent of large language models (LLMs), Heidegger anticipated a crisis in which the question of the nature of language at the same time forces upon us the question of what it means to be human. In the contemporary age of AI, this subversion reaches an unprecedented extreme: as generative systems automate discourse, human existence faces a profound alienation from the essence not just of language, but also of the human being. This paper reflects on Heidegger’s critique of technological linguistic dominance by synthesizing his reading of Stefan George’s poem “Das Wort” with Simone Weil’s ethics of attention. Through George’s poetic insight—that "where word breaks off no thing may be"—Heidegger frames renunciation not as loss, but as the essential posture required to restore our relation to language and beings as a whole. To illuminate what such renunciation entails today, this paper integrates Simone Weil’s concept of attention as a “negative effort”—an intentional refraining from mastery and consumption. Ultimately, this paper argues that in an era dominated by artificial language production, Weil’s negative effort provides a phenomenological framework for George's renunciation. Far from a passive retreat, this disciplined refusal of linguistic dominance serves as the necessary condition for overcoming technogenic alienation and recovering a genuine (eigentlich) relationship with language, in keeping with the appropriating event (Ereignis).

The Concept of World as the Social World in Heidegger

Heidegger, who seeks to go beyond the modern philosophical thought of subjectivity, uses intentionally a term 'Dasein' instead of 'consciousness.' And Dasein is the most important concept in fundamental ontology, defined not as a 'thinking ego' isolated in the consciousness but as 'Being-in-the-world. It signifies that Dasein is no longer thought as an isolated subject encapsulated in the immanent consciousness; rather it is opened to the world and exists with things. Thus, with ‘Being-in-the-world' the problem of isolated subject derived from the philosophy of Descartes is solved. Moreover, based on this concept of world, Heidegger attempts to establish a unity of subject and object, this attempt has been regarded as his original accomplishment. However, when we examine Heidegger's thinking in the context of the phenomenological movement, his attempt to found a unity of subject and object in respect to the world may not seem original. In the genetical phenomenology, Husserl also argues that there is formed a unity of subject and object in the life-world. Because there exists this similarity, the relation between the philosophy of Heidegger and Husserl's phenomenology has not been clearly elucidated. But although there exist similarities between Husserl's life-world and Heidegger's existential world, since they both seek to establish a primordial unity between a subject and object in respect to factical thing that is given to the pre-thematic realm prior to a reflective understanding, in strictly speaking their understanding of the world is fundamentally different. In this paper we want to show that when the concept of existential world in 'Being-in-the-world' is understood as the social world distinguished from the natural world, we can finally grasp a peculiar meaning of the existential world.

Reception of Heidegger’s Being and Time in Modern Korean Poetry

This presentation aims to elucidate the influence of Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) on modern Korean poetry in the second half of the twentieth century. It focuses on the poem “A Screen” (1956) by Su-young Kim, one of the most influential figures in modern Korean poetry. This presentation begins by providing an overview of the historical context in which existentialism, including Heidegger’s philosophy, was broadly received in Korea. It, then, offers an interpretation of Kim’s poem “A Screen” through the concept of death developed in Being and Time. In this way, the presentation highlights the enduring significance of Heidegger’s account of mortality in an age when AI increasingly challenges traditional understandings of what it means to be human.

Transnational Technē and Maritime Dwelling: The Case of Ikat

This presentation reconsiders technology in the age of artificial intelligence through Heidegger’s later thought and the transnational history of Asian textiles. It begins with Alexander Karp’s interpretation of Adorno, in which the language of authenticity as interiority socially integrates violent impulses, and assumes that contemporary LLM-based systems provide a technological condition for such integration by representing and ordering society and the battlefield. Against this, the paper recalls that Heideggerian authenticity is not interiority opposed to social exteriority, but a mode of Dasein’s finite existence. AI, too, is finite: it does not create ex nihilo, but depends on already existing things. The presentation therefore turns from information to things, focusing on ikat/kasuri as a primordial technē of dyeing and weaving. Through Shūzō Kuki’s remarks on kasuri and iki, it examines clothing as a concrete style through which plural human existences appear to one another. Yet because Japanese kasuri and even the striped patterns associated with iki derive from transregional textile histories, clothing cannot be reduced to a single Volk or civilization. The paper proposes “maritime dwelling” as a Heideggerian perspective on transnational technē beyond civilizational clash and toward another account of world-forming technologies in Asia today.

Catastrophe or Crisis? On Losing and Finding Language Anew in the Age of AI

Beginning from Heidegger’s discussion of Hölderlin’s lines in "Mnemosyne" that “we almost have / lost our tongue in foreign lands” in Was heißt Denken (GA 8: 12/10), this paper argues that artificial intelligence should not be understood as a catastrophe external to human existence, but rather as a crisis within crisis that discloses the metaphysical condition in which we already stand. Drawing on Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin alongside his thinking of language, technology, and truth, I contend that contemporary discussions of AI often begin from the wrong question: they ask what machines can or cannot do while presupposing an unquestioned conception of human intelligence, language, and worldhood. The contemporary problem is no longer simply whether machines can attain human understanding. Rather, as language models become increasingly fluent, we are tempted to reduce our lives to the level of readymade and calculative framings of language. The danger therefore lies less in the machine itself than in the metaphysical disposition that long precedes AI, namely the conception of language as a system of meaning and grammar, or as the expression of mental representations. In this sense, AI functions as a mirror of the history of metaphysics: it reflects back to us the conception of language and intelligence that we have constructed, revealing what was already operative within our understanding of language in a more explicit and urgent manner. Drawing from Heidegger’s account of Gestell and “idle-talk” (Gerede), I interpret LLMs as a technologically intensified form of discourse without any relation to the world. Yet AI also renders visible the calculative and standardized tendencies already operative within contemporary language, thereby opening a hermeneutic possibility for reconsidering the topological meaning of dwelling in language.

The Way of Translation and the Way of Thinking: The Question of Language and Interculturality in Heidegger’s Philosophy in the Age of AI

This presentation seeks to understand the “way of thinking” in Heidegger’s philosophy as a “way of translation,” and, along this path, to explore the possibility of encounters with others, particularly encounters between East and West. From this perspective, it further examines the significance of translation in the age of AI

In Being and Time (1927), the “destruction” (Destruktion) of the history of ontology seeks to expose Being—which has been forgotten and concealed within Western metaphysics, preoccupied solely with beings—through “phenomenological hermeneutics.” In this attempt, Heidegger identifies “interpretation” (Auslegung) with “translation,” arguing that such translation has contributed to the concealment of Being (SZ, 32). If this is so, destruction consists in returning to the experience of Being in ancient Greece while rearticulating it through translation and revising inherited translations. Translation in Heidegger cannot be separated from his way of thinking. Concerning translation, Heidegger states that translation occurs whenever language is spoken, whether in dialogue or monologue, calling this “originary translation” (ursprüngliches Übersetzen) (GA54, 17f.). Moreover, if Heidegger’s way of thinking is a way of listening to the voice of Being and giving linguistic form to that experience, then it is also a “way of translation” (Weg des Übersetzens) (GA5, 339).

In general, translation brings about encounters with other cultures, but can East and West encounter one another along this “way of translation”? This presentation examines the possibility of such encounters along Heidegger’s path of translation and thinking, and explores the intercultural potential of Heideggerian thought. Alongside Heidegger, it also considers the importance of translation in the age of AI.

The Docile Body and Being-in-the-World: Foucault, Heidegger, and the Question of Agency in the Age of AI

Contemporary discussions of artificial intelligence tend to inquire whether AI technologies augment, diminish, or supplant human agency. This paper argues that such inquiries overlook a more fundamental question: the conditions within which agency becomes possible and intelligible. Bringing Michel Foucault’s analysis of the docile body into dialogue with Martin Heidegger’s account of being-in-the-world, the paper examines how AI’s presence in practices bears upon the possibilities through which agency is enacted.

Employing Heidegger’s notion of being-in-the-world as the constitutive structure of Dasein, this paper clarifies that agency cannot be understood as the exercise of a subject standing outside its world, but rather as the capacity for possibilities within the disclosed meaningful world. With AI technologies interrogated as an increasingly pervasive manifestation of the technological mode of revealing Heidegger characterizes as Gestell, this paper, thereafter, gestures towards the significance of Foucault’s notion of the docile body in illumining how AI participates in the ontical organization of the world within which Dasein encounters and projects possibilities.

Thus, in placing the Foucauldian docile body and Heideggerian being-in-the-world in productive dialogue, the paper accounts for two dimensions of a single philosophical problem: the relation between the formation of the embodied subject and the world of projected possibilities within which it acts. The paper, therefore, enables an critical inquiry of AI and agency: not whether machines will supplant human agency, but how the phenomenon of AI reveals the conditions under which human agency is mediated and exercised in the age of AI.

Metaphysics without Metaphysics and the Possibility of Mathematics of Absence: A Reflection on Heidegger's Idea of Self-Manifestations of Being

This study examines Heidegger’s descriptions of the meaning of being from the perspective of the history of metaphysics within the Western metaphysical tradition. It focuses on being as presence, the end and transformation of metaphysics, and the responses or dispositions proposed by Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Luc Marion. Using Heidegger’s phenomenological-hermeneutical approach, the study argues that Heidegger’s descriptions of the self-manifestation of being, together with these thinkers’ responses, open the possibility of a non-representational metaphysics and further disclose the character of being itself. The study claims that Heidegger’s concepts—including being as possibility (Da-sein), presence and absence, It-Gives, self-showing, appropriation, mystery, giving, and difference—together with his proposals of openness, poetic dwelling, listening-to-being, and meditative thinking, provide the ground for such a metaphysics. Likewise, Levinas’s notions of the Other and the Infinite, Derrida’s notion of différance, Marion’s notion of doubling metaphysics echo, gesture toward, and aspire to this non-representational form of metaphysics: a thinking characterized by radical openness and by non abstractive and non-totalizing modes of thought. This form of thinking is made possible by being’s own law, logic, and intelligibility, which Heidegger understands in relation to the metaphysical meaning of mathematics. Because these characteristics point toward being’s own internal realm, they belong to absence, mystery, concealment, and the hidden. Thus, this study proposes the possibility of a “mathematics of being’ that remains prior to and concealed from the mathematics of the mathematics of presence: an “in-mathematics,” futural mathematics, and eschatological or apocalyptic mathematics that is still awaited. Consequently, the metaphysics of the mathematics of absence implied in Heidegger’s account differs from and precedes the metaphysics of mathematics developed from Plato to modernity as Heidegger himself elaborates, Badiou’s ontology as mathematics, as well as Deleuze’s metaphysics of difference, insofar as these remain within the horizon of mathematics of presence or representational metaphysics.

From Technē to Technology: A Phenomenological Study of Calculative Thinking

This paper explores calculative thinking in Martin Heidegger’s early and later works, drawing on Plato’s Sophist (2003) and The Question Concerning Technology (1977), and extends the discussion to digital technology, particularly artificial intelligence. In Plato’s Sophist, Heidegger engages with Aristotle’s analysis of virtue (arete) and Plato’s distinction the philosopher and the sophist. Within this framework, Heidegger retrieves the original meaning of techne as a mode of unconcealment and a process approaching truth. In The Question Concerning Technology, Heidegger clarifies that techne means “bringing-forth” (poiesis), a mode of revealing that lets things appear as they are, in contrast to modern technology, which enframes beings as resource. Put differently, Heidegger suggests that techne, as art, offers a way of rethinking and responding to the truth in the technological age. However, this paper argues that both techne and modern technology allow beings to appear in determinate ways, insofar as both are grounded in calculative thinking. For Aristotle, calculative thinking, as expressed in techne, is oriented toward an end (telos) and refers to the process of making, which involves design and planning. For instance, in order to produce something, one must first design its form and determine how it will be implemented. For Heidegger, calculative thinking, as manifested in modern technology, renders beings predicable and controllable, whereas mediative thinking, as embodied in art, returns to the question of being. In this sense, calculative thinking operates in both techne and modern technology. Therefore, this paper raises the question of whether calculative thinking, while tending to determine the way in which beings are disclosed, remains open to different modes of disclosure. In other words, does digital technology necessarily reduce beings to resource, or might it disclose beings otherwise?

The Forgathering of Λόγος and of Ge-stell: Inquiring into LLMs

Discussion of large language models (LLMs) has largely asked whether such systems think, understand, or speak. This paper argues that the more decisive question is what becomes of language itself. Examining λέγειν in its proper sense as legen, prior to its being named Λόγος, it sets out five structural features of the forgathering within λέγειν, and investigates how each is transformed in the challenging-forth that rules throughout modern technology. This transformation is then followed through a language model's filtering, tokenizing, training, and predicting, where no operation fails to orient itself toward next predicting, so that regulating and securing become its chief characteristics. Language is thereby brought into the mode of presencing Heidegger names standing-reserve. Man, however, is not, which is against the common statement that the living being which has language must be brought into that mode along with it.

Dwelling in Uncanniness: Understanding What It Means to Be at Home in the City through Heidegger

Urban expansion draws human life inevitably towards the city, the center of human affairs and opportunity. However, the city places heavy demands onto the individual, alongside its sensorial overwhelm, that it renders the urban life alienating or uncanny. Such uncanny landscape forces the city dweller to struggle to find a sense of belonging or home. Invoking the works of Martin Heidegger on the question of home, my project investigates how the human being can be at home in an uncanny city. I argue that the city, particularly Metro Manila, evokes a sense of uncanniness by virtue of its historical background, urban development, and socio-political dynamics. Alongside this uncanny landscape, the inquiry into the question of home reveals the human being’s essential nature as uncanny or not-at-home. This convergence intensifies the struggle for the city dweller, who must inevitably navigate an uncanny place and simultaneously look for ways to poetically dwell. I argue that it is in moments of solitude by virtue of poetry that we may be able to glimpse into the possibility of being at home within our essential homelessness. By allowing ourselves to confront our uncanny being, we can eventually disclose a shared destiny among city dwellers and reclaim the uncanny city as a place of authentic dwelling.

The Fourfold in The Age of AI

In contemporary philosophy of technology, as exemplified by postphenomenology, Heidegger’s theory of technology has been criticised as abstract, pessimistic, monolithic and romantic. In contemporary philosophy of technology, the ‘empirical turn’ has emerged, focusing on the analysis of concrete artefacts rather than the abstract essence of technology.

In response to these criticisms of Heidegger, it is certainly possible to argue, from the perspective of philological Heidegger studies, that Heidegger is concerned with ‘ontological’ issues and has no interest whatsoever in ‘ontic’ issues such as the analysis of artefacts. However, it remains important to reconsider Heidegger’s concepts such as ‘enframing’ and the ‘fourfold’ at a concrete level and to consider their significance in contemporary philosophy of technology.

This presentation will examine the significance of the fourfold in the philosophy of technology. This task will be carried out through a response to contemporary philosophers of technology engaging in discussions on the fourfold, whether positive or negative. For example, Verbeek points out that the discussions of the fourfold and enframing employ different measures arbitrarily; he criticises Heidegger for failing to explain why the fourfold manifests itself in a jug but cannot do so in a hydroelectric power station, arguing that the concept of the fourfold is nothing more than a product of Heidegger’s nostalgia. On the other hand, Borgmann develops the concept of the fourfold into the argument of ‘focal things.’

Today, in the age of AI, is Heidegger’s theory of technology nothing more than nostalgia? Is Heidegger’s concept of the fourfold, as Feenberg complains, merely something that lures us into ‘a manufactured mystery’? Or might the fourfold, even in the modern era, be something with concrete substance rather than merely a fabricated myth? If so, what specific practices would constitute the Gelassenheit required to manifest the fourfold in the age of AI? 

It Was Never Born, It Didn’t “Think”, It Is Not Towards Death: The Unthinking Automaton and the Automaton Unthought in the Phenomenologies of Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger

Artificial intelligence has arrived as an event and demands, in Kant's sense, a reflective judgement: no rule is given. But equipment that works smoothly recedes, and in receding the large language model will prove most determinative of what becomes of thought. The window for the question is that of its conspicuousness, and it is already closing.

Two histories meet in the machine. The first is a history of conferral: the automata, from the clockwork bird to the model producing text, in which the sign of life bestowed on inorganic matter issues in mere automaticity — automatos, "self-minded," inverting into its opposite. The second is a history of transcendental constitution in which the tradition repeatedly finds, but never thematises as such, an automaticity within spontaneity's own domain: blind in Kant's synthesis, mechanical in Hegel's Gedächtnis, anonymous in Husserl's signification, recessive in Heidegger's equipment and pre-comprehension. In each the constituting withdraws as such, and what appears occupies the place vacated: the unthinking automaton the tradition has at once thought, but also left unthought. Writing, on Derrida's reading, has already passed from exterior supplement to constituting condition; it inheres in the language model and is the clue to what, in the age of AI, is to become of thought.

Heidegger returns irreconcilable responses to the question of a thinkerless thought's counting as thinking. For the existential analytic, a being with no being to be — never born, not towards death — stands outside groundedness and groundlessness alike: not deficient thought but no thought at all. For the Heidegger who reads Aristotle, a thought's stature lies in outstripping the existence that conveyed it. On either path, what withdraws into the setting of our thinking can deaden it to the question of what thought is — of that, whatever else is undecidable, we can be certain.

The Calculable Now and the Sudden Moment of Freedom: The Possibility of Human Freedom in the Age of Total Determinacy concerning Heidegger’s Interpretation of Time

In an age characterized by the rapid development of artificial intelligence and increasingly complex systems of data processing, especially in view of machine-learning processes whose operations and outcomes remain unpredictable for us, the question of the meaning and possibility of human life and freedom reveals its urgency more than ever. Long before the development of artificial intelligence, Heidegger drew attention to the difference between the “time of thinking” and the time of the “thinking machine”. The increasing speed of computation seems to compress time itself, such that all possibilities for any future appear already to have been calculated in advance within a past and to attain total determinacy in the most compressed form of the present.

Heidegger, however, speaks of a gathering or compression of time in a different sense: an instant in which past and future are held together within the present. He develops this insight through his interpretation of the concept of ἐξαίφνης (the sudden moment) in Plato’s Parmenides, and he places it in opposition to Aristotle’s νῦν (the now). The Aristotelian concept of the now, which, for Heidegger, provides the basis for the ordinary or vulgar understanding of time, obscures the significance of Plato’s ἐξαίφνης. Heidegger further draws upon this concept in his interpretation of the temporality of the enactment of human freedom in his lectures on Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom.

Whereas Aristotle’s νῦν is understood within the horizon of presence and determinacy, Plato’s ἐξαίφνης points beyond every determination, presence, and calculability. If the meaning of this suddenness and incalculability can be ontologically clarified, it may be distinguished from the compression of time effected by computational speed and algorithmic processing. Such a distinction would enable us to articulate ontologically the possibility of human freedom in relation to and within the time and epoch increasingly and totally determined by AI-driven computation. In doing so, it may become possible to show how free human existence and its openness to the future are possible not outside calculable time, but rather within it and in an interaction with it.

Nishida Kitarō and Heidegger on Art as the Happening of Truth

This presentation asks what role the act of making a thing (poiēsis), and the act of beholding it, plays when truth happens in a work of art. It approaches this question through a motif that underlies the philosophies of art of both Nishida Kitarō and Martin Heidegger: resistance (Widerstand). Neither philosopher influenced the other, but both rejected the modern aesthetics that reduces beauty to the feeling or experience of a subject, and both abandoned the matter–form model, on which a work is the artist's idea impressed upon material. They differ, however, in where they locate resistance. For Nishida, the thing resists the body of the maker: the body becomes a tool, and a form arises only where the clay pushes back against the hand. For Heidegger, the earth resists the openness of the world: the work stands as a work because its material is never used up, and truth finds its footing in this self-secluding earth. Taking this difference as its starting point, the paper reads each philosopher from the standpoint of the other. Seen from the side of making, Heidegger does not explain why the earth remains in the work. Seen from the side of the work, Nishida does not explain how the resistance felt in making continues to exist in the finished work once it has left the artist. The paper concludes that truth in art happens not by overcoming resistance but through it, and that a philosophy of art must therefore understand the work both as something made and as a thing that stands on its own.

Heidegger’s Conception of the History of Being and Tetsuro Watsuji’s Theory of Art

Watsuji Tetsuro (1889-1960)’s Fudo (1935) （風土, Climate）seems to include elements that resonate with Heidegger’s conception of the ‘History of Being.’ In one Chapter of this text Watsuji compares ancient Greek art and modern European art and argues that as time goes on, more and more regularities such as calculations and proportions are applied in European art. His thought is similar to Heidegger's idea that as time passes, the way in which the Being is perceived in Europe becomes more and more uniform. Watsuji assumes that Japanese art, in which natural objects are combined not by geometric proportions but by a “unity of a meeting of spirit (気合い)”, is a way to stop global uniformity. In this presentation, I will discuss Watsuji’s theory by connecting it with Heidegger’s conception of ‘the History of Being’ and that of artworks and try to phenomenologically consider the “unity of a meeting of spirit” that Watsuji found in Japanese art.

A Comparison of Heidegger's and Kuki's Understandings of Art

Shuzo Kuki(九鬼周造、1888-1941) met Heidegger in Germany, where he attended Heidegger's seminars and engaged in direct conversations with him. Although the specific contents of their dialogues can only be indirectly inferred through Heidegger's dialogue with Tomio Tezuka(手塚富雄), these interactions offer a glimpse into the similarities and differences in their understandings of aesthetic consciousness and language. This paper aims to examine the gaps and disconnections that may not have been fully resolved in their actual dialogues, focusing on their respective published works on art. In particular, this study provides a comparative analysis centered on Heidegger's The Origin of the Work of Art and Kuki's The Structure of Iki.

Care as Possibility for a Dialogue between Confucianism and Heidegger's Thought

This article tries to reflect on the possibilities and limitations of cross-cultural intellectual dialogue by examining a case of the dialogue between Confucianism and Heidegger's philosophy in Taiwan. This kind of intellectual dialogue usually manifests as interpretive comparisons between Confucian scholars and Heidegger's philosophy. Given that the substantive dialogue between Confucianism and Heidegger's philosophy initially came mostly from contemporary New Confucian scholars who were less dogmatic, we will take one of Nian-Feng Chiang's (蔣年豐) Heidegger interpretation papers as the subject of analysis. Chiang first compares Heidegger's concept of care (Sorge) with the Confucian concept of "worry about woes" (憂患意識) through interpretive comparison, then extends the comparison to Heidegger's concept of destiny (Geschick) with the Confucian concept of "mandate of heaven" (天命), and finally explains how Confucianism establishes its political philosophy based on the concept of "mandate of heaven". Because Chiang only attempted to use Heidegger's philosophical concepts to elucidate Confucianism, he did not further consider whether his interpretation could, in turn, inspire an understanding of Heidegger's political views. Therefore, while his interpretive comparison as a form of intellectual dialogue is not far-fetched, it remains at the initial stage of cross-cultural dialogue and awaits further development by future generations.

The Unfinished Transition: Finitude, Death, and the Displacement of Ontology

If Heidegger’s thought constitutes a “necessary transition,” then this transition perhaps does not merely designate a path from ontology to ethic; rather, it first discloses an inherently unstable liminal state: a philosophical position that oscillates incessantly between the human and Being, or between Being and the otherwise than Being. Levinas understands Heidegger’s work as granting priority to Being, or as remaining subjected to Being, thereby returning all meaning to the horizon of Being. Yet does this critique simultaneously presuppose another, more fundamental demand—namely, the possibility of thinking an “otherwise than Being” (autrement qu’être)?

In this sense, the question is perhaps not whether Heidegger fails to arrive at ethic, but whether his analyses of Dasein, anxiety (Angst), and death have already unsettled the metaphysical grammar centered on Being, without yet having been understood as such. When death is no longer grasped as an object, but as a possibility of the end that is always already borne, Dasein no longer merely points toward the disclosedness of Being, but instead experiences, in its finitude, a fissure that cannot be fully subsumed within Being.

To understand Heidegger as a “transition,” then, is perhaps also a posture of reading: an attempt to seek, within ontology, its exterior. However, can such an exterior ever be demarcated? Or does it merely disturb the boundaries of ontology through a mode of différance, ensuring that the question of “human” can neither fully return to Being nor be simply situated outside of it? Could this, too, also a mode of the “otherwise than Being”? Ultimately, in what sense can the ontological displacement triggered by this “otherwise than Being” be regarded as ethical?