DOI: 10.4312/as.2023.11.1.

27-50 27

Martin Heidegger and Kitayama Junyū:

Nothingness, Emptiness, and the Thing
Eric S. NELSON*2

Abstract
Heidegger’s early philosophical project was identified with a nihilistic philosophy of
nothingness after the 1927 publication of Being and Time—with its depiction of the radi-
cal existential anxiety of being-towards-death—and his 1929 lecture “What is Metaphys-
ics?”—with its analysis of the loss of all orientation and comportment in the face of an
impersonal self-nihilating nothingness. Heidegger’s philosophy of nothingness would be
contrasted in both Germany and Japan in the 1930s and 1940s with “Oriental nothing-
ness” by authors such as Kitayama Junyū, a neglected Japanese philosopher active in Ger-
many and an early interpreter of Heidegger and Nishida. In this contribution, I trace how
Heidegger’s reflections on nothingness and emptiness (which are distinct yet intertwined
expressions) become interculturally entangled with East Asian discourses in the early
reception of his thought, particularly in Kitayama and the introduction of Nishida’s phi-
losophy into Germany, and their significance in Heidegger’s “A Dialogue on Language”.
Keywords: emptiness, Heidegger, modern Japanese philosophy, nothingness, things

Martin Heidegger in Kitayama Junyū: Nič, praznina in stvar

Izvleček
Heideggerjev zgodnji filozofski projekt enačimo z nihilistično filozofijo niča po objavi
knjige Bit in čas leta 1927 – s prikazom radikalne eksistencialne tesnobe biti-k-smrti – in
predavanja »Kaj je metafizika?« iz leta 1929 – z analizo izgube vsake orientacije in ravnan-
ja spričo brezosebnega samoničnega niča. Heideggerjevi filozofiji niča so v tridesetih in
štiridesetih letih 20. stoletja v Nemčiji in na Japonskem avtorji, kot je Kitayama Junyū,
zapostavljeni japonski filozof, ki je deloval v Nemčiji in bil zgodnji interpret Heideggerja
in Nishide, nasproti postavljali »orientalski nič«. V tem prispevku zasledujem, kako se
Heideggerjeva razmišljanja o niču in praznini (ki sta različna, a prepletena izraza) med-
kulturno prepletajo z vzhodnoazijskimi diskurzi v zgodnji recepciji njegove misli, zlasti
pri Kitayami in uvajanju Nishidove filozofije v Nemčiji, ter njihov pomen v Heideggerje-
vem »Dialogu o jeziku«.
Ključne besede: praznina, Heidegger, sodobna japonska filozofija, nič, stvari

* Eric S. NELSON, The Hong Kong University of Science

and Technology.
Email address: eric.nelson(at)ust.hk
28 Eric S. NELSON: Martin Heidegger and Kitayama Junyū

Introduction: Heidegger and the Philosophy of Nothingness

How is it that Martin Heidegger became a philosopher identified with nihilism
despite his frequent assertions to the contrary? Heidegger’s Being and Time elu-
cidated a primordial nullity at the heart of human existence as thrown into the
world in being-towards-death: “The projection is not only determined as each
time thrown by the nullity of its fundamental being, but as a projection it is it-
self essentially a nullity (Nichtigkeit)” (GA 2, 1171). After the 1927 publication
of Being and Time—with its analysis of existential anxiety (Angst) in one’s own-
most being-towards-death (Sein-zum-Tode)—and his 1929 Freiburg inaugural
lecture “What is Metaphysics?”—with its analysis of anxiety in the face of the
impersonal self-nihilating nothingness (das Nichts nichtet), Heidegger’s thinking
was identified with the prioritization of nothingness. Several European and East
Asian thinkers described his thought as a “philosophy of nothingness” (Philoso-
phie des Nichts or Nichts-Philosophie), a negative ontology or meontology (Wahl
1957, 154), a variety of nihilism (Gürster 1938, 48; Meyer 1936, 86–89), and a
European form of Buddhism (Anders 2001, 64). Günther Anders encapsulated
these interpretative tendencies in a 1946 essay “Nihilism and Existence” in which
he criticized Heidegger’s thought as “in a certain sense” a modern European Bud-
dhism that is simultaneously atheistic, skeptical, nihilistic as well as conservative,
ritualistic, and melancholically longing for redemption (ibid.).
Heidegger’s thinking of nothingness in Being and Time and “What is Metaphys-
ics?” was critiqued as meaningless in positivism, as bourgeois fascistic irrational-
ism in Marxism (e.g., Lukács 1955), and for its depersonalizing impersonality in
the name of the interpersonal other in Emmanuel Levinas and for the sake of
radical subjectivity Jean-Paul Sartre (Levinas 1932; 1982; Sartre 1943).
Rudolf Carnap condemned Heidegger’s Nichts-Philosophie as reifying negation
(which is inherently derivative and secondary to assertion) into a meaningless
pseudo-concept of nothingness and denied it even the expressive value of the
poetic word (Carnap 1931, 241).2 Although not yet present in his 1932 essay
“Martin Heidegger et l’ontologie”, Levinas’s 1935 work De l’évasion (On Escape)
(1982) interrogated the impersonality of the “there is” (il y a) of being murmuring
in the abyss of nothingness from which we are compelled to yet cannot escape.
Sartre contested in his 1943 magnum opus L’Être et le néant (Being and Nothing-
ness) the apparent impersonality of Heidegger’s “nothing nothings” with the being

1 I cite the collected works of Heidegger (Gesamtausgabe), as GA plus volume and page numbers.
2 Carnap’s verdict on Heidegger’s nothing was shared by numerous positivists in the early 1930s: Oskar
Krauss (1931, 140–46); David Hilbert (1931, 485–94); Otto Neurath (1933, 8); A. J. Ayer (1934, 55–
58). On their divergent conceptions of the very question of nothingness, see Nelson (2013, 151–56).
 Asian Studies XI (XXVII), 1 (2023), pp. 27–50 29

(the for-itself of consciousness) that is self-nihilating in the face of the absurdity

and superfluity (de trop) of being-in-itself (Sartre 1943).
The interpretation of Heidegger as a nihilistic philosopher of nothingness was con-
tested by Heidegger himself as well as increasingly in his global postwar reception.
Although the primary narrative is one of the “turn” (die Kehre) from Dasein to the
priority of being, another narrative emerging after the conclusion of the Second
World War confirmed the earlier line of interpretation in stating that Heidegger’s
turn consisted of a turn away from a “philosophy of nothingness” to a “thinking of
being itself ” (Sein selbst) (Naber 1947). Heidegger himself maintained in his later
postscript (1943) and introduction (1949) to “What is Metaphysics?” that he had
been systematically misconstrued. His discourse of nothingness challenged rather
than advocated nihilism, as it did not conclude with the priority of brute or radical
nothingness. The nothingness encountered in attunements of radical anxiety and
boredom is primarily a veil of and perspective on being. The transition through
nothingness indicates being not only as abyssal (abgründig) but more fundamen-
tally an illuminating shining forth of the clearing (Lichtung), openness (Offenheit),
and a kind of emptiness (die Leere) of being.
The clearing is an opening lighting center beyond beings that encircles all that is
akin to the barely known nothing (Heidegger 2002, 30; GA 5, 40). Nonetheless,
Heidegger can still maintain in the 1943 postscript: “One of the essential sites of
speechlessness is anxiety in the sense of the horror to which the abyss of the noth-
ing attunes human beings” (Heidegger 1998, 238). Nothingness continues to carry
a dimension of existential horror and anxiety in relation to the abyss, as explicitly
stressed in his 1929 lecture and in the early reception of his thought (and not only
in French existentialism). At the same time, Heidegger articulates elements of the
abyss that is “neither empty nothingness nor a dark confusion, but the event.”3 There
are dimensions of openness, associated in Kantian philosophy with the sublime, such
as the emptying of the clearing and encountering being’s calm that encompasses
inexhaustible expansiveness in releasement in, for example, the Japanese Buddhist
expression kū 空 (“emptiness”) in “Aus einem Gespräch von der Sprache. Zwischen
einem Japaner und einem Fragenden” (“A Dialogue on Language between a Japa-
nese and an Inquirer”) (written during 1953/54) or as disclosed in the self-veiling
expansiveness of the Siberian wilderness to the two prisoners of war in the 1944/45
“Abendgespräch in einem Kriegsgefangenenlager in Rußland” (“Evening Conver-
sation in a Prison Camp in Russia”) that offers a critique of German nationalism.4

3 GA 79, 128. On Heidegger’s notion of the appropriating or endowing event, see Nelson (2007,
97–115).
4 For the former, see Heidegger (GA 12, 80–146); for the latter, see Heidegger (GA 77, 204, 218, 230).
30 Eric S. NELSON: Martin Heidegger and Kitayama Junyū

Heidegger’s Intercultural Entanglements with East Asian

Philosophy
How did Heidegger’s thinking of nothingness become entangled with East Asian
philosophies? The question of nothingness and emptiness in Heidegger is an in-
triguing one considered on its own. This question is also at play in Heidegger’s
reception in Japanese philosophy and the field of “comparative philosophy” and in
Heidegger’s reflections on the emptiness of the thing in “The Thing” (Das Ding)
and language in “A Dialogue on Language” that are informed by Heidegger’s in-
tercultural entanglements.5
Heidegger had contacts with East Asian philosophy as early as 1919. He has been
suspected of borrowing the expression “being-in-the-world” (in-der-welt-sein) from
the 1919 German translation of Okakura Kakuzō 岡倉覚三, The Book of Tea (Cha
no Hon 茶の本), which he received as a gift in 1919 from Itō Kichinosuke 伊藤吉
之助. The German translation remarks of the Zhuangzi 莊子 that it indicates an
“art of being-in-the-world” relating to ourselves in the present.6 Heidegger’s dis-
course of being-in-the-world reflects no doubt Lutheran discourses of the fallen-
ness, sinfulness, and suffering of “being in the world” (“in der Welt sein” without
hyphens) and yet potentially—as suggested in this reading of the Zhuangzi—an art
of immanently and responsively dwelling with and amidst things within the world.7
Heidegger repeatedly noted in the postwar period the special relationship be-
tween the discourse of nothingness in “What is Metaphysics?” and his dialogues
with Japanese philosophers. Heidegger remarked in a 1969 Dankansprache that
German and European philosophers had characterized this lecture as “nihilism”,
and its Japanese translator Yuasa Seinosuke 湯浅誠之助 was one of the few to
comprehend what it meant to indicate (GA 16, 712). In reference to the Japanese
translation of “What is Metaphysics?” in “A Dialogue on Language” Heidegger
marks the shift in his thinking from an anxious existential nothingness to a mind-
fully attuned opening emptiness. In the 1930s, perhaps aware of the comparisons
being made, he is concerned with differentiating his thinking of nothingness and

5 There is already a vast and diverse literature concerning Heidegger and comparative and intercultural
philosophy, including (among numerous other works) Buchner (1989); Davis (2013); May (1996);
Nelson (2017; 2019).
6 “Die chinesischen Historiker haben vom Taoismus stets als von der ‘Kunst des In-der-Welt-
Seins’ geredet, denn er handelt von der Gegenwart, von uns selbst.” (Okakura1919, 31). Also see
Imamichi (2004, 123); May (1996, 118); Davis (2013, 460–65).
7 As described in May (1996), there are various anecdotes of Heidegger reading and referring to the
Zhuangzi in the 1920s and other apparent influences. Heidegger explicitly and implicitly discusses
passages from the Zhuangzi in Heidegger (1989) and Heidegger (2010), as illustrated in Nelson
(2019, 362–84). On Heidegger’s notion of world and worldview, see Nelson (2011, 19–38).
 Asian Studies XI (XXVII), 1 (2023), pp. 27–50 31

non-being (as being’s event) from any form of Buddhism. Heidegger declared in
1935 that his thinking of being was the opposite of Buddhism.8 This dismissive
gesture of rejection is not evident in the 1953/1954 “A Dialogue on Language” or
his 1963 dialogue with the Buddhist monk Bhikku Maha Mani. In a discussion
concerning the Japanese understanding of kū (emptiness), he states that emptiness
and nothingness are the same (“Die Leere ist dann dasselbe wie das Nichts”) and
the interlocutor responds that for the Japanese emptiness is the “highest word” for
what Europeans mean to say with the word “Being”.9
Heidegger was introduced into Japan as a philosopher of nothingness. The 1930
Japanese rendition of “What is Metaphysics?” was the earliest published transla-
tion in any language of a text authored by Heidegger. His early Japanese recep-
tion emphasized this lecture’s encounter with nothingness. Yet, unlike his early
European reception, the critical side of its Japanese reception stressed how this
nothingness was still too beholden to being in contrast with Asian (“Oriental”)
conceptions and experiences of nothingness and emptiness; or, more precisely as
will be seen below, an intertextually mediated discourse of the Western discourse
of nothingness interpreted in relation to modern Japanese appropriations of Bud-
dhist śūnyatā.

Daoist Nothingness and Buddhist Emptiness between East and West

Such an interpretive strategy is particularly evident in Nishida Kitarō 西田幾
多郎 (1870–1945), the founding figure of the Kyōto school. He distinguished
an “Oriental” philosophy and logic of nothingness from Occidental philosophy
and its logic of being.10 The conception of “Oriental nothingness” has a complex-
ly mediated relation with premodern interpretations of Daoist nothingness and
Buddhist emptiness. Formed in response to the critiques of “Oriental nothing-
ness” and nihilism in philosophers such as Hegel and Nietzsche, it was centered
on the Japanese understanding of kū (Buddhist śūnyatā), and—in the discourses
of Asian and comparative philosophy of this era—could be extended (arguably
beyond Nishida’s own intentions) in the geopolitics of Japanese Pan-Asianist dis-
courses (as expressed by Kitayama and other thinkers) to integrate and rank Asian

8 “Kein Buddhismus! das Gegenteil.” (GA 65, 171)

9 “Für uns ist die Leere der höchste Name für das, was Sie mit dem Wort ‘Sein’ sagen möchten.” (GA
12, 103)
10 For an excellent overview of Nishida’s philosophy of the nothingness in relation to Heidegger, see
Krummel (2018, 239–68).
32 Eric S. NELSON: Martin Heidegger and Kitayama Junyū

forms of spirit in a quasi-Hegelian form of historical development.11 The notion

of “Oriental nothingness” was ideologically extended to encompass and fuse a
wide range of divergent and incompatible perspectives: South Asian Hindu and
Buddhist forms of negativity (from the “neti neti” of the Br.hadāran.yaka Upanis.ad
to the Buddha’s fourfold negation [catus.kot.i]), Daoist and mysterious learning
(so called “Neo-Daoist”) wu 無, and the initial pole of nothingness (wuji 無極)
in interplay with the great ultimate (taiji 太極) that emerged in Yijing 易經 com-
mentarial transmissions and Neo-Confucian teachings. The ultimate teachings of
nothingness were expressed in East Asian Mahāyāna Buddhism, culminating in
its Japanese forms. As discussed below, no doubt in response to criticisms seen in
European thinkers such as Hegel and Nietzsche, Japanese expressions of nega-
tivity and nothingness were interpreted as primarily world- and life-affirmative.
In the context of Japanese-German relations in the early 1940s, Nishida’s thought
was introduced to German audiences with the 1943 translation Die intelligible
Welt: Drei philosophische Abhandlungen (The Intelligible World: Three Philosophical
Treatises). Robert Schinzinger, a student of Ernst Cassirer (PhD in 1922) who
helped introduce Nishida to Germany in the early 1940s with his introduction
to this translation and in other writings, distinguished Nishida and Heidegger
at length in the introduction. He articulated Nishida’s recognition of how being
becomes manifest in Dasein’s being held into nothingness in Heidegger and the
extent to which Heidegger remained captured in the Western metaphysical para-
digm of the supremacy of being and its logic (Nishida 1943, 30–33).
Another figure addressed the significant affinities and differences regarding noth-
ingness between Nishida and Heidegger during this period. Kitayama Junyū 北
山淳友 (1902–1962) lived in Germany from 1925 to 1944. He initially studied
with Edmund Husserl in Freiburg before completing his dissertation with Karl
Jaspers on Vasubandhu’s metaphysics in Heidelberg in 1929. In this book Met-
aphysik des Buddhismus (Metaphysics of Buddhism), published in 1934, he was one
of the first to deploy the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger to interpret
Yogācāra Buddhism (Kitayama 1934).12 A 1935 issue of Kant-Studien noted that

11 On “Oriental nothingness” and nihilism in German philosophy, see Nelson (2022, 83–96). Pan-
Asianism was, to briefly summarize, typically “anti-colonial” in contesting Eurocentrism and
Western colonialism and nationalist in construing Japan as the inheritor, restorer, and culmination
of “Oriental” culture and spirit that could defend Asia against Occidental encroachment. Kitayama
and Kanokogi Kazunobu 鹿子木員信 were among the most active pan-Asianist intellectuals in
Germany. Kanokogi wrote his dissertation with Rudolf Eucken in Jena in 1912 on “The Religious”
and appears much more willing to directly advocate fascist ideology as director of the Japan Institut
in Berlin and subsequently in Japan; on Kanokogi, see Szpilman (2013, 233–80).
12 Published in 1934 as Kitayama’s Metaphysik des Buddhismus: Versuch einer philosophischen
Interpretation der Lehre Vasubandhus und seiner Schule. Kitayama was among a number of rightwing
 Asian Studies XI (XXVII), 1 (2023), pp. 27–50 33

this dissertation attempted “to interpret and reveal Vasubandhu teachings in the
language of contemporary German metaphysical theorists (Scheler, Husserl, and
Heidegger)” (Brightwell 2015, 450).
Kitayama was familiar with Heidegger’s thought from his time in Freiburg, thank-
ing him in the preface to his dissertation, and extensively referring to his works
(including “What is Metaphysics?”) and utilizing them to phenomenologically
interpret Vasubandhu’s philosophy as an elucidation of karmic and samsaric Da-
sein. In his 1934 book, Yogācāra Buddhism does not offer a psychologistic philos-
ophy of consciousness but rather an existential “analytic of Dasein” of karmically
thrown Dasein and its constitution and structures of being and the possibility
of redemption in “absolute nothingness” exemplified by the path of the Buddha.
In suffering, finitude, and mortality, Dasein is a question to itself threatened by
death and thrown and lost in terrifying nothingness (Kitayama 1934, 78). In the
existential emptiness of thirst (tan.hā) and in encountering the disorienting ques-
tionability of relative nothingness, absolute nothingness (śūnyatā) is disclosed. It
is construed in Heideggerian language as Dasein annihilates itself in relation to
its own fundamental groundlessness in the illumination of absolute nothingness
(ibid., 194–95). In such absolute nothingness, in the radical unknowing of the
Buddha, freedom and creative life are disclosed as immanent ways of Dasein’s at-
tunement and comportment within this samsaric world. Buddhism was not oth-
erworldly and nihilistic for him but a way of affirming life. Kitayama subsequent-
ly stressed in the 1940s the tragic and heroic affirmative moment in Buddhist and
Japanese nothingness that confronted this karmic samsaric order by emptying
and dismantling the constraints of the individual self for a greater collective self
and purpose.
The return from radical nothingness to everyday karmic life is also found in his
subsequent interpretations of Dōgen Zenji 道元禅師 (Kitayama 1940, 1–15) and
Laozi 老子 (Kitayama 1942) in the early 1940s. As discussed below, Kitayama
attributed Heidegger’s expression “the nothing nothings” (“das Nichts nichtet”)
to Laozi in his 1942 work West-östliche Begegnung: Japans Kultur und Tradition
(West-East Encounter: Japan’s Culture and Tradition). Kitayama’s altered relation
to Heidegger is more explicitly stated in a 1943 article on Nishida published

Japanese intellectuals such as Kanokogi who studied in Germany, were active in Germany, and in
German-Japanese relations during the National Socialist period. On his relations with German
rightwing discourses and National Socialism, see Brightwell (2015, 431–53). On the intermixture
of phenomenological and völkisch (racial and nationalist) geopolitical and georeligious tendencies in
Kitayama’s philosophy of religion, see Kubota (2008, 613–33). Wolfgang Harich, an East German
communist philosopher after the Second World War who had helped Kitayama edit his German
publications during the first half of the 1940s, describes Heidegger’s influence on Kitayama and his
activities in Germany, in Harich (2016).
34 Eric S. NELSON: Martin Heidegger and Kitayama Junyū

in Kant-Studien. Kitayama maintained there that “Occidental spirit”, including

Heidegger, is anthropomorphic, intellectualist and representational, fixating sub-
ject and object and prioritizing the positivity of being (Kitayama 1943b, 268–69).
“Oriental spirit” is in contrast cosmic, intuitive, and naturalistic. Taking natural
and inter-human relations as its guide, it prioritizes absolute nothingness as en-
compassing the fullness of all things and discovers reality in “absolute contradic-
tion”. Nishida comprehends the reality of the world in its groundless nothingness
through the unity of opposites in the self-identity of absolute contradiction.13 This
explication of the relational interpenetration of all particular things draws on the
logic of Huayan 華嚴, and the idea of heightening contradictoriness and paradox-
icality into the “great doubt” (C. dayi, J. taigi 大疑) accords with the Zen Buddhist
practice of meditating on the kōan (gong’an 公案).
In their writings on Nishida and contemporary Japanese philosophy, Schin-
zinger and Lüth warn against a nihilistic interpretation of absolute nothingness
and an overly radical reading of absolute contradictoriness in Nishida. They po-
tentially limit its boldness and distinctiveness vis-à-vis Western philosophical
discourses of nothingness. They construe Nishida’s nothingness as concretion,
fullness, and determinacy, differentiating a vacant abstract nothingness defined
through negation from the genuine nothingness of the fullness and completion
of reality itself (dharmakāya) and its Buddha-nature that cannot be restricted to
or conditioned by being (Lüth 1944, 99–101; Nishida 1943, 30–32). But this ap-
proach is misleading, if such concepts are conceived as positing positive objects
or subjects, since Nishida maintains that nothingness is a predicate that cannot
be in any way reified into a subject (Schinzinger 1940, 31; Taketi 1940, 283–85;
Imamichi 2004, 46). While Carnap warned of reifying negation, because it is
derivative to and presupposes assertions about objects, Nishida’s predicate of
nothingness indicates the true emptiness of things in which they have—without
the fixations of essence, self, or substance—their own self-determination and
concrete specificity (Taketi 1940, 285). Nothingness is determinate and has its
own specificity without relying on a logic of determinate negation that is ulti-
mately affirmative.
Nishida’s genuine thinking emerges, according to Kitayama, as a genuine philos-
ophy of nothingness that reconceives Oriental nothingness through its confron-
tation with Occidental being and liberates us from the limitations of Western
conceptions of being, including that of Heidegger:

13 See Nishida (1943, 140). On the early German-language reception of Nishida’s philosophy
of nothingness: Kitayama (1943b, 274); Lüth (1944, 99–101); Schinzinger (1940, 38), and
Schinzinger’s introduction in Nishida (1943, 30–32).
 Asian Studies XI (XXVII), 1 (2023), pp. 27–50 35

That is why we call it “philosophy of nothingness” in contrast to the phi-

losophy of being of the Occident from Plato to Heidegger. The nothing-
ness that Nishida has reached as the ultimate of all being and of thought
is the ancient inheritance of East Asian spirit. It occurs as a problem in
both Buddhism and Daoism.14

The distinctiveness of Occidental and Oriental nothingness is a key theme in the

intercultural philosophy of figures related to the Kyōto School. In a 1940 Ger-
man article by Taketi, no doubt with Nietzsche’s accusation of life-denying pas-
sive nihilism in mind, the radical nihilism of “Oriental nothingness” affirms life,
world, and the act from the abyss of the present rather than denying the present
as in Christianity and European nihilism (Taketi 1940, 278–79). In the classic
account of Hisamatsu Shinichi 久松真一, “Oriental Nothingness” is irreducible
to both logical negation and existential nothingness. As self-emptying, it is prior
to the existential negativity and logical negation that, respectively, existentialism
and positivism deploy to explain or discard nothingness.15 Hisamatsu elucidated
awakening as a return to the moments of ordinary daily life in which (adopting
an expression from the iconoclastic Tang dynasty Chan master Linji Yixuan 臨
濟義玄, which is in turn drawn from the Zhuangzi) the genuine person without
positionality or rank (wuwei zhenren 無位真人) abides in non-abiding, dwelling
without fixation (Hisamatsu 2002, 29–33).
Kyōto school and other Japanese philosophers such as Kitayama deployed an in-
terculturally reshaped Buddhist notion of emptiness as nothingness (linked with
the European discourse of nothingness and Chan-Zen Buddhist uses of wu/mu
無) to demonstrate the insufficiency of nothingness in Occidental thinking and
Heidegger. Nishida and Kitayama appreciated the impersonality (in contrast to
the critical readings of Levinas and Sartre that stressed the person and subjec-
tivity) and verbal event character of nothingness in Heidegger. Still, Heidegger’s
thinking of nothingness as the way of encountering being (Sein) is in so doing
restricted just as negative mysticism and theology condition and relativize noth-
ingness by using it as a tool to reveal God. Heidegger’s nothingness is therefore

14 “Deshalb nennen wir sie ‘Die Philosophie des Nichts’ im Gegensatz zur Seinsphilosophie des
Abendlandes von Platon bis Heidegger. Das Nichts, das Nishida als das Letzte alles Seienden und
des Denkens erreicht hat, ist das alte Erbgut des ostasiatischen Geistes. Es tritt als Problem sowohl
im Buddhismus als auch im Taoismus auf.” Kitayama remarked further: “Nishida überwindet diese
Krise, indem er auf seinen Ausgangspunkt zurückgreift und im Jenseits von Subjekt und Objekt
nicht das Sein, sondern das nur durch das Denken unerfaßbare Nichts sieht. Mit der Philosophie
des Nichts beginnt die selbständige Philosophie Nishidas und befreit sich von jeglichem Einflusse
abendländischer Philosophen” (Kitayama 1943b, 269).
15 A paradigmatic analysis of “Oriental Nothingness” is found in Hisamatsu 1960, 65–97.
36 Eric S. NELSON: Martin Heidegger and Kitayama Junyū

limited in the light of “absolute nothingness” (zettaimu 絶対無), which is the

self-emptying locus or place (basho 場所) of all perspectives and positions, insofar
as it still refers to and is bound to being and its implicit yet all too representational
subject/object modeling of reality. Heidegger fails to adequately address the abso-
lute nothingness beyond God and being. Far from being pessimistic or nihilistic,
the absolute nothingness at the heart of Oriental culture is, according to Nishida,
the genuine locus of encountering concrete phenomena just as they are in their
suchness and is accordingly world-affirmation (Nishida 1939, 10–11). In absolute
nothingness, the mountain is precisely the mountain, water is water, and beings
are just what they are (Nishida 1943, 119). Nishida is here referring to the kōan
attributed to Qingyuan Weixin 青原惟信, a Tang Dynasty Linji Chan Master,
which appears in Dōgen’s Mountains and Waters Sutra (Sansui Kyō 山水經).
After the early entanglements between Heidegger and Chinese and Japanese phi-
losophy from the 1920s to 1940s, Heidegger’s nihilating nothingness was increas-
ingly perceived as a touchstone in the emerging field of comparative philosophy
not only in Germany and Japan but in international scholarship in the emerging
field of comparative philosophy. Much of this literature was more willing than
Kitayama, Lüth, and Schinzinger to accentuate the affinities between Heidegger’s
and Nishida’s nothingness.
Takeuchi Yoshinori 武内義範 stated: “A way of thinking akin to Nishida’s is
found in the recent development of Heidegger’s philosophy, although there was
no direct influence either way” (Takeuchi 2004, 203). Relying on Nishida’s notion
of nothingness as identity in complete contradiction, he notes: “Heidegger’s phi-
losophy of Being meets with a philosophy of Nothingness—because Being and
Nothingness are identical in their contradiction” (ibid., 204). Sarvepalli Radhakr-
ishnan noted in 1952 how Heidegger gave nothingness “an active function (das
Nichts nichtet), which influences our being. He even makes it one with absolute
being. One is reminded here of the Buddhistic conception of the void (śūnya)”
(Radhakrishnan 1952, 430). Swan Liat Kwee remarked in 1953 how “the Void”
has an active creative function in Heidegger’s “das Nichts nichtet” (Kwee 1953,
184). Both statements concerning self-nihilating nothingness show how it is ac-
tive, creative, and world-generative in Buddhist śūnyatā as much as with early
Daoist wu 無 despite the radical differences between these two concepts.
Heidegger himself did not directly or explicitly attribute generative or creative
qualities to nihilating nothingness in his 1929 “What is Metaphysics?” In that
context, encountering nothingness in radical anguish and boredom places beings
and the being of Dasein itself radically into question. Freedom and transcendence
into the world are disclosed in this existential questionability and uncanniness.
 Asian Studies XI (XXVII), 1 (2023), pp. 27–50 37

Heidegger’s thinking, which appears to evoke Daoist nothingness (the empty

earth, vessel, and thing) and at times Buddhist emptiness (empty form and sky),
became interculturally entangled in comparative philosophy with generative in-
terpretations of nothingness. This is not without sources in Heidegger’s own path
of thinking that shifts from a focus on existential nothingness to nothingness as
the potentially generative emptiness of the between and the clearing.

Heidegger and Kitayama: Nothingness, Emptiness, and the Spacing

of Things
Several anecdotes by Heidegger and others testify that Heidegger engaged in
conversations about Japanese thought and Zen Buddhism with visiting students
and scholars from 1919 to near the end of his life. Nishitani Keiji 西谷啓治 re-
ported that he and Heidegger had extensive discussions about Zen Buddhism
during his time at the University of Freiburg from 1937 to 1939. Heidegger is
reported to have said after reading a book by Daisetsu Teitarō Suzuki 鈴木大拙
that: “If I understand this man correctly, this is what I have been trying to say in
all my writings.”16
Echoing a Zen Buddhist teaching, Heidegger’s Japanese interlocutor in “A Di-
alogue on Language” states that in emptiness, the mountain appears. The entire
conversation and its questions center on emptiness and gathering. How are noth-
ingness and emptiness “the same” (dasselbe) and “other than all presence and ab-
sence” (“das Andere zu allem An-und Abwesenden”) as stated in the questioner’s
reply (GA 12, 103)? What is the emptiness in respectful distancing and with-
drawal (Entziehen) and in the stillness and silence (die Stille) that calls and in
which one can listen?
The two interlocutors delineate and enact a kind of emptiness in which words
and memories arise, gather, and disperse. Emptiness is seen as informing osten-
sibly “elemental” Japanese expressions such as iki 粋, which became familiar to
Heidegger through Kuki Shūzō 九鬼周造 (GA 12, 80–86).17 In the Noh theatre,
the empty stage allows gathering to occur (GA 12, 101). Deploying well-known
Buddhist imagery, kū is described as the limitless expansiveness like that of the
sky (GA 12, 129) and as the open and emptiness of the sky (GA 12, 136). The
clear transparent sky is the classic Buddhist image for śūnya, and clouds are im-
ages of arising and disappearing colors, forms, or phenomena. Note that clouds

16 Compare Buchner (1989, 169–72), Davis (2013, 460–65), and May (1996, 109).
17 On Kiki’s aesthetics, see Nara (2004).
38 Eric S. NELSON: Martin Heidegger and Kitayama Junyū

indicate “colors” in this conversation, as color or form (C. se, J. iro 色) is the
translation of rūpa (form) in Sanskrit. The emptiness of hearing allows the gath-
ering of words in language, and the dialogue concludes with the gathering of
that which endures (Kuki, the long-departed friend) in conversation and remem-
brance (GA 12, 143, 146).
Given Heidegger’s phenomenology of the thing in his early and middle works,
how can emptiness be the gathering and place of the thing in the 1949 Bremen
Lectures and in the 1950 essay “The Thing”? Is there an emptiness, as Heidegger
pursued in the 1935 Contributions to Philosophy (GA 65, Beiträge zur Philosophie),
that signifies something else than the failure of anticipation and expectation or
the empty intentionality, which may or may not be fulfilled, of classical phenom-
enology (GA 65, 381–82)? Is there a more specific relation between the nothing-
ness depicted in 1929 and the emptiness of language and the thing in his postwar
writings that helps illuminate his statement that they are the same?
One contextual clue is found in Kitayama’s works, which were widely cited in Ger-
man discussions of Japanese thought during the National Socialist era, including
by the geopolitical theorist Karl Haushofer and Paul Lüth whose 1944 book Die
japanische Philosophie relies on Kitayama’s delineation of Nishida’s philosophy of
nothingness (Lüth 1944, 97–108). Kitayama’s 1940/1942 book West-östliche Be-
gegnung: Japans Kultur und Tradition (West-Eastern Encounter: Japan’s Culture and
Tradition) was first published in 1940 and substantially revised in a second edition
printed in 1942.18 Kitayama elucidates an East Asian philosophy of nothingness
that is inspired not only by Buddhist emptiness but also by Daoist nothingness (wu
無), the primordial ground of being, of Laozi (Kitayama 1942, 40). Nishida in his
1939 article had critiqued the fixation and radicalization of nothingness in Daoism,
contending that the teaching of absolute nothingness is only adequately achieved
in Mahāyāna Buddhism (Nishida 1939, 17).19 Kitayama shares this prioritization of
Mahāyāna teachings (Kitayama 1943a, 3). He is, however, more willing to embrace
Daoist teachings of nothingness and the thing, as he depicts them as shaping the
formation of East Asian and Zen Buddhist thought and culture.
The Daodejing and the Zhuangzi texts expressed a variety of naturalism for early
twentieth-century Japanese interpreters—such as in Anesaki Masaharu 姉崎正治
(1915), Okakura (1919), and Kitayama (1942)—who emphasized its constitutive
role in Chan Buddhism and the East Asian aesthetic that embraces naturalness

18 Kitayama’s West-Östliche Begegnung: Japans Kultur und Tradition was first published in 1940 and
revised and expanded in 1942.
19 On the “Nishida circle’s”, as it was earlier designated, understanding of being and nothingness in
early Chinese thought, compare Imamichi (1958, 54–64).
 Asian Studies XI (XXVII), 1 (2023), pp. 27–50 39

through emptiness. Anesaki construes Daoism as a harmonizing repose in na-

ture and the great primordial mood of the way (Anesaki 1915, 55–56). Okakura
interpreted it as a naturalistic this-worldly relativism and an art of adoptively
“being-in-the-world” (Okakura 1919, 27–32). Kitayama defines it as a “natural-
istic nihilism” in which freedom is intuited in nothingness in a comportment of
stillness and non-acting action (Kitayama 1942, 40–41). Nothingness is the gen-
erative beginning of heaven and earth, and being the womb of the myriad things
(ibid., 174). This nothingness is the ground of all entities, silent and wordless, un-
speakable and unconceptualizable, and approached only through a practice of be-
coming empty and clear (ibid., 24, 38–41). Speaking of the Tang dynasty painter
and poet Wang Wei 王維, Kitayama delineates how in the emptiness of solitude
and silence, real space can be encountered and the fullness and self-being (ziran
自然) of things speaks to the poet and appears to the painter: “We translate this
explication of space with the words of Laozi: ‘The nothing nothings’” (ibid., 160).
It is space that is emptying through things, which evokes and yet is very distinct
from how Heidegger elucidates the same eleventh chapter of the Daodejing and
the “emptying” of the thing as will be considered below.
Kitayama contends that nothingness (Nichts) and the non-self (Nicht-Ich) form the
essence and unity of Far Eastern culture (Kitayama 1942, 183). East Asian phil-
osophical and aesthetic-poetic sensibilities reflect in his account the insight that:
“The nihilation of the nothing (das Nichten des Nichts) is the activity of space that,
from the human perspective, is given as form or appearance.” Each reality is the
appearing of a shadow in light and each thing, such as the mountain or the stone,
is a throw (Wurf) through the nihilation of space (ibid., 161). The expression “the
nothing nothings”, attributed to Laozi apparently in reference to Daodejing 11, is
a characteristic of the spatiality in which the thing appears as shadow and throw
as a nihilation of the nothing. The nihilating activity of the nothing is construed
by Kitayama as a primordial spatiality in which things arise. The expression wuwu
無無, which he seems to have in mind here, could be construed as “the nothing
nothings” or the functioning of/arising from nothingness in the Daodejing com-
mentary of Wang Bi 王弼.20 This expression is not found in the transmitted text of
the Daodejing but only in subsequent Daoist and in East Asian Buddhist sources, in
which it is entangled with the emptiness of emptiness (kongkong 空空).
In classical Indian Theravāda and Mādhyamika teachings, emptiness means to be
empty of substantial selfhood (ātman), self-nature (svabhāva), and form (rūpa) in
dependent arising (pratītyasamutpāda). Emptiness operates as a world-constitut-
ing primordiality in dharmadhatu, tathāgatagarbha, and Vajrayāna teachings, in

20 On Wang Bi’s philosophy of generative nothingness, see Nelson (2020, 287–300).

40 Eric S. NELSON: Martin Heidegger and Kitayama Junyū

which it is given a generativity and creativity that continues to resonate in Kitay-

ama who clarifies the “absolute” self-nihilating nothingness in the very different
contexts of Laozi and Nishida. Notwithstanding his father being a Pure Land
Buddhist priest and his early studies of Yogācāra Buddhist philosophy, teachings
in which śūnyatā does not play as all-pervasive a role as in Mādhyamika, “Bud-
dhist nothingness” (as an interculturally mediated concept informed by Buddhist
and German philosophy) assumes a fundamental cultural and social-political ori-
entation in his German writings of the 1930s and 1940s on Buddhism, Daoism,
and—as with other Japanese nationalist intellectuals of this era—Shintōism and
the “way of the warrior” (bushidō 武士道).
There are abundant instances of the problematic social-political character of the
philosophy of nothingness in Kitayama’s works. We mention two of them here.
First, in Kitayama’s 1943a booklet Heiligung des Staates und Verklärung des Men-
schen: Buddhismus und Japan (Sanctification of the State and Human Transfiguration:
Buddhism and Japan), Mahāyāna Buddhism occupies a crucial role for him in
providing the Japanese people a universal geopolitical and georeligious teaching
of compassionate world-redemption that justifies their global mission (Kitayama
1943a; Kubota 2008, 622). It is specifically the Mahāyāna teaching of nirvān. a
(nothingness as sublime infinite generative source) that sanctifies and is embod-
ied in the Japanese imperial state led by a heavenly Emperor that transfigures
and emancipates humanity through its world-historical role (Kitayama 1943a,
31–32). In this modern Japanese nationalist context, nothingness is constructed
to imply the Emperor, evoking but moving beyond traditional Buddhist political
theologies, akin to how nothingness ultimately signifies God in negative theology.
Second, a “heroic ethos” of nothingness is unfolded in his 1944 book Heroisches
Ethos (Heroic Ethos).21 As typical of a number of Japanese thinkers during this era,
Japanese Buddhism and Zen become forms of heroic self and world affirmation in
contrast to Indian Buddhism. In his interpretation of the concluding fifth book on
emptiness of The Book of Five Rings (Gorin no Sho 五輪書) by Miyamoto Musashi
宮本武蔵, an ethos without principles or norms emerges in the spirit of this “real
nullity” (wirkliche Nichtigkeit), in which there is nothing at all, no knowing, and no
evil but only the functioning of the good. Whereas “relative nullity” counters the
seduction of the false and illusory, real nullity is articulated—assimilating a long
series of images of perfectly attuned action from the Zhuangzi’s Butcher Ding nour-
ishing life in cutting up the ox through Zen Buddhism to this heroic ethos—as a

21 The relationship between nationalist politics and the idea of nothingness in the Kyōto School
is a highly contested one. On Kitayama’s political context and tendencies, see Brightwell (2015,
431–53); Kubota (2008, 613–633). On the social-political problems of the Japanese discourse of
“absolute nothingness”, see Ives (2009).
 Asian Studies XI (XXVII), 1 (2023), pp. 27–50 41

spontaneous and detached comportment and ethos that transcends the bounda-
ries of skill and technique (Kitayama 1944, 110–11). Absolute nothingness is the
unobstructed good. Kitayama’s philosophy of nothingness is problematic given its
historical and social-political positionality—in the intersections of Japanese-Ger-
man intellectual and ideological exchanges in the 1930s and 1940s—and due to its
commitment to the priority of an ethos of detachment and indifference rather than
an ethics of responsive compassion to others and things through nothingness.22

The Emptiness of Words and Things

Questions of nothingness and emptiness are at play in Heidegger’s various dis-
cussions of the emptiness of the thing that, depending on the text, explicitly or
implicitly refer to the empty vessel of Daodejing 11. As in the German edition of
Okakura’s Book of Tea, Heidegger calls the vessel a jug (Krug; the English transla-
tion has pitcher). Although Heidegger extensively engaged with the two Daoist
classics in different German translations, one must wonder about the reoccurring
themes from Okakura’s book that he received as a gift in 1919.
It is uncertain to what extent Heidegger is cognizant of the specificity of Japa-
nese arguments and debates concerning his conception of nothingness beyond the
general acknowledgement and appreciate that he noted in 1953/1954 and 1969
(as described previously above). Heidegger was aware of Carnap’s positivist and
Sartre’s existentialist responses to it, denying their appropriateness while—due to
shifts in his own thinking—transitioning from the existential nothingness of the
late 1920s (which Kitayama categorized as relative) to nothingness as the gen-
erative clearing and emptiness of the “in-between” of beings (Seiende) and being
(Sein). Heidegger’s mature thought evokes yet has an unclear relation to Daoist
nothingness, Buddhist emptiness, and Japanese discourses of absolute nothing-
ness. For instance, Kitayama construed being as the womb of things arising from
nothingness in his analysis of the Daodejing; Heidegger posited nothingness as
the middle term between being and things. He stated in the late 19030s that
nothingness is a saying of being more primordial than somethingness. Nothing-
ness signifies for Heidegger not “not-beings” but Being. It is an originary saying
of Being and its immeasurable answerless yet ontological event.23

22 There is a rich literature on the intersections between German and Japanese thought, and Japanese
philosophy and politics, during this era, including Brightwell (2015); Kubota (2008); Ives (2009).
23 Heidegger states: “das Nichts anfänglicher und wesender (ursprünglich das Seyn er-eignender)
als das ‘Etwas’? … Nichts hier besagt: überhaupt nicht ein Seiendes, sondern: Sein … Das Nichts
entspringt nicht aus der Ab-sage an das Seiende, sondern ist anfängliches Sagen des Seyns, Sagen
der Neinung in der Er-eignung.” (GA 74, 24)
42 Eric S. NELSON: Martin Heidegger and Kitayama Junyū

Heidegger himself repositions his argumentation in “What is Metaphysics?” as

a confrontation with and moment toward the potential overcoming the “philos-
ophy of nothingness” and the nihilism that he locates at the core of modernity.
Nothingness is increasingly linked with the “not” of beings (Seiende) in Being
(Sein), which is not merely negative or negational in the sense of a nihil nega-
tivum, and with the ontological difference: “The nothing is the ‘not’ of beings,
and is thus being, experienced from the perspective of beings” (Heidegger 1998,
97). To the degree that being (even as the Being that is not beings in the on-
tological difference) remains the epicenter of his thought, Heidegger remains
beholden to the Occidental paradigm of being and has not yet arrived near the
vicinity of Nishida’s genuine locus of nothingness (as interpreted in Kitayama,
Schinzinger, and Nishitani, among others).24 Nothingness remains for Heideg-
ger a perspective on being; nothingness and emptiness are “the same”; and yet,
at the same time, emptiness is potentially (since it is spoken by his fictionalized
Japanese interlocutor) the highest name for being (GA 12, 103). While Hei-
degger could comprehend the interlocutor’s claim in his own discourse, as he
too has thematized a kind of emptiness of being, the questioner responds by
expressing hesitation, reserve, and stepping back from the identification of the
emptiness of kū and Sein. Heidegger’s expression of reticence is appropriate
given the continuing distances between nothingness in his own and Buddhist
and Japanese discourses.
Heidegger’s “A Dialogue on Language” centers on the untranslatability of a lan-
guage, as the questioner repeatedly withdraws and holds back from describing
iki in the Occidental philosophical language of aesthetics, kū in the Western lan-
guage of being, or kotoba 言葉 as language (Sprache). Such hesitation and reserve
have been interpreted as an arrogance standing against crosscultural communica-
tion and as humility and modesty toward the other. It is presented in this dialogue
as enacting an emptying and stillness that allows for a listening and entering the
other’s saying instead of a mere speaking about language and communication
(GA 12, 147–49). The encounter transpires through the emptiness of language,
which undoes fixations, and yet not without language to the extent that there can
be no openness of beings, of that which is not a being (Nichtseienden), or of emp-
tiness without language (Heidegger 2002, 46; GA 5, 61).
In what sense then can one attribute emptiness to being in Heidegger’s postwar
thinking? He maintained in the 1951 version of “Overcoming Metaphysics” that
the emptiness of beings (Seiende) is the distance and forgetting of being (Sein),
while the emptiness of being in which beings arise can never be filled up with the

24 Note the discussions of Heidegger’s nothingness in Nishitani (1989; 1983).

 Asian Studies XI (XXVII), 1 (2023), pp. 27–50 43

fullness of beings (GA 7, 94). Heidegger states in several iterations of his philos-
ophy of the thing that emptiness not only allows the gathering of a plurality of
things, which constitute a lingering moment and a local region or place, but the
gathering (Versammlung) of the singular thing that allows it to be as the specific
thing that it is.
Heidegger’s later elucidation of the empty thing is repeatedly meditated by his
reading of the empty vessel of the Daodejing. It is distinctive from the herme-
neutics of the emptiness and self-nihilation of space that Kitayama attributed to
Laozi. Whereas Kitayama construes the thing in response to Heidegger as a tem-
porary transient throw, a shadow, and a fold arising through the activity of self-ni-
hilating spatiality, Heidegger addresses emptiness as the gathering of elements,
and the fourfold (Geviert) of sky and earth, mortals and immortals that allows the
thing to be as what it is. Hisamatsu noted in a conversation with Heidegger on
May 18, 1958 that the Occident conceives the origin as being and Zen as empty
formlessness in which there is freedom without restriction. Heidegger concurs in
his response that emptiness is not a negative nothingness nor is it a lack. Spatial
emptiness, which does not exhaust emptiness, is a clearing as granting (das Ein-
räumende) the gathering of things (GA 16, 555).
The empty jug receives, gathers, and offers wine (fusing imagery from Hölderlin
and the Daodejing) precisely in its emptiness. What then is the relationship be-
tween Heidegger and the Daodejing? It is the most frequently mentioned non-
western text in his works and it is evoked through indirect references. It is well-
known that Heidegger extensively engaged with the Daodejing in the early 1940s,
even attempting a translation of the text with Paul Shih-yi Hsiao (Xiao Shiyi 蕭
師毅). Heidegger initiates his reflections on the emptiness of the thing in relation
to Daodejing 11 in the conclusion of the 1943 essay “The Uniqueness of the Poet”
(GA 75, 43–44). Emptiness is portrayed there as “in-between” (Inzwischen) which
he elsewhere described as “the openness” (die Offenheit) of being and the spacing
of “the between heaven and earth” (das Zwischen von Himmel und Erde).
In a series of reflections from the 1940s and 1950s, Heidegger engages the image
of emptiness and the “empty vessel” (expressed in Daodejing 4 and 11, and reima-
gined by Heidegger as an empty jug) more powerfully evoking the Daodejing than
in his 1943 essay while no longer directly naming Laozi. In the first dialogue of
the 1944/1945 Country Path Conversations (GA 77), the first 1949 Bremen lecture
(GA 79), and the 1950 essay “The Thing”, emptiness proves to be the condition
of gathering of the elemental and of materiality itself in the thing. As gathering:
“The thing things world” (“Das Ding dingt Welt”) (Heidegger 1971, 178; GA 7,
182). The thing no longer requires the artwork and creation to mediate it, as in the
44 Eric S. NELSON: Martin Heidegger and Kitayama Junyū

mid-1930s; the thing itself can disclose and open a world such that without the
thing there can be no disclosure and openness (GA 5, 54).25
Heidegger described in “The Thing” how when we fill the jug or pitcher, the liquid
flows into and from its emptiness as it retains and gives. The emptiness is not a
mere container. It is what conditions and contains the materiality of the container.
This emptiness, as a nothingness belonging to the pitcher and making it what it
is, is what the pitcher, as a containing container, is. This means that: “The vessel’s
thingness does not lie at all in the material of which it consists, but in the emp-
tiness that holds” (Heidegger 1971, 167; GA 7, 171). This emptiness is its own
emptiness or self-emptying, not the voidness of generalized physical space, which
we must allow to be in its encounter and “let the jug’s emptiness be its own emp-
tiness” (Heidegger 1971, 168; GA 7, 173).
The emptiness, or the void as die Leere is translated by Albert Hofstadter, is what
constitutes the vessel’s holding. The empty space, this nothingness of the jug, is
what the jug is as the holding vessel. Yet as the holding is enacted by the jug’s
emptiness, the potter who shapes and forms the vessel on the potter’s wheel
does not create, make, or produce the vessel, but shapes the materiality and
emptiness in which the artisan works. Things are shaped rather than fabricated
by human practices and techniques. In not only shaping the material clay, but its
very emptiness, the potter participates in the forming and shaping of emptiness
into form. It is in the specificity of this emptiness that the vessel’s thingliness
genuinely lies.

Two Readings of Emptiness

As we have seen, Heidegger should not be considered a thinker of emptiness as
a static or spatial voidness but instead of the illuminating clearing and empty-
ing that unfixes, clears, and frees the way. Emptying plays a twofold role in his
writings of the 1950s that calls back to the methodological emptying of “formal
indication” (formale Anzeige) in the 1920s that destructs reifying abstractions and
fixations and allows encountering things in their myriad concrete ways of be-
ing. In the conclusion to “The Thing”, Heidegger reflects on both the emptying
that constitutes the thing and the emptying comportment that allows the thing
to address us as the thing that it is in its own way of being in emptiness. There
is accordingly: (1) the emptying that is the gathering of the thing, and (2) the

25 Much more should be said (than can be said here) about the complicated relationship between
“work” and “thing” in the 1934/1935 “The Origin of the Work of Art” (GA 5) and the 1950 “The
Thing” (GA 7).
 Asian Studies XI (XXVII), 1 (2023), pp. 27–50 45

emptying that allows the (no longer only worldless as in 1929/1930) thing as
world-gathering and disclosing to be encountered.
Emptying is an undoing of fixations and the preparation of a pathway and the
clearing of the thing is its self-emptying that requires a respectful and reverent (if
arguably inadequately responsive) distance and reserve that avoids absorption and
consumption. Japanese aesthetics (as interpreted by Kuki) understands respectful
reserve in the encounter as detachment (compare Nara 2004). In Heidegger’s step
back (Schritt zurück), in allowing distance and the genuine between (das Zwischen,
which the modern loss of distances and uniformity of space has disrupted) to
reappear with the thing, one is called by the thing as thing, and then perhaps can
begin hear and more appropriately listen and respond.
The distinctive yet overlapping notions of emptiness and nothingness operate in
Heidegger as the highest expressions for being. These notions are entangled with
his understanding of Daoism and Zen Buddhism and with his philosophy’s East
Asian reception. In the emptiness of being, the thing and its sense are not anni-
hilated, but rather it can be as the thing in the fullness of its own way of being.
Heidegger once again appears to echo East Asian discourses, as in the sentence
from the kōan attributed to Qingyuan Weixin and mentioned by Nishida: in the
awakening of emptiness, mountains are directly mountains, and waters are direct-
ly waters (Nishida 1943, 119).
Kitayama’s 1940 German translation and commentary on Dōgen’s Genjō Kōan 現
成公按 clarifies the movement from things to nothingness back to things through
the forgetting and falling away of the self and its constructs that divides it from
things. This is the self-illumination of a holistic relational selflessness in which
each thing is singularly itself just as the slightest dewdrop can reflect the entirety
of the moon (Kitayama 1940, 4, 10–11). Yet this does not imply a static abstract
harmony. The logic of the kōan that confronts the self is antinomian. It leads the
meditator into a dead-end (Sackgasse) without any recourse that is fractured in a
breakthrough in which the obstructing duality of being and knowing, object and
subject, falls away (Kitayama 1940, 15).
According to Kitayama’s 1943a Nishida article, with its critique of Occidental
spirit and its fixation on being, Heidegger’s thinking of being still thinks the
nothing in an Occidental manner and precludes the illumination of absolute
nothingness that is unrestricted by and otherwise than being no matter how rad-
ically it might be thought (Kitayama 1943b, 268–69). This is not the decay of
difference into an “empty unity of opposites unconcerned with one another”, of
which Heidegger warned in his analysis of the essential relational strife of earth
and world (Heidegger 2002, 26; GA 5, 35). Kitayama portrays Nishida’s absolute
46 Eric S. NELSON: Martin Heidegger and Kitayama Junyū

nothingness as indicating/an accord in complete contradiction—that is to say, a

self-determination and self-identity encountered in the intensification of cacoph-
ony, contradictoriness, and multiplicity of singular phenomena—and reality itself.
Heidegger and Kitayama are not cultural purists, perhaps despite their own in-
tentions, insofar as they offer highly mediated, interculturally, and intertextually
entangled conceptions of nothingness, emptiness, and the thing. Engaging Kitay-
ama’s philosophy of nothingness, which draws on Heidegger, Nishida, and classic
East Asian sources, resituates and contextualizes the formation of an increasing-
ly intercultural discourse of nothingness. In this contribution, I have presented
an historical overview of the relationship between nothingness and emptiness in
Heidegger in relation to aspects of his interactions and entanglements with Chi-
nese and Japanese philosophy. Heidegger’s interests in and entanglements with
Chinese and Japanese philosophy emerged in 1919 and the early 1920s and con-
tinued throughout his life.

Conclusions
Early Daoism and Zen Buddhism fascinated Heidegger to the degree that scholars
accused him of plagiarizing from their sources (Imamichi 2004; May 1996). The
Daodejing and the Zhuangzi were texts to which he recurrently returned in the
context of communication and exchange with East Asian students and intellectuals
and their German interlocutors. His direct and indirect references to the two Daoist
classics of the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi, which fascinated the younger and ma-
ture Heidegger, focus on a threefold configuration of questions that are operative
in the center of his own thought and his broader engagement with Chinese and
Japanese philosophy: nothingness/emptiness, thingliness, and the way.
In this interculturally mediated context, Heidegger’s encounters and entangle-
ments with Daoist and Japanese thought can be said to be neither a fleeting and
accidental curiosity (to be dismissed as done by Eurocentric readings of Hei-
degger) nor can they be appropriately understood as constituting a far-reaching
“Daoist” or “East Asian” reorientation in his philosophical journey (as in overly
optimistic comparative and intercultural interpretations). Due to limits of space,
I will examine elsewhere questions concerning whether radical nothingness nec-
essarily entails or is a consequence of nationalist politics, if the phenomenological
and political aspects of Heidegger and Kitayama can be disentangled, and wheth-
er the philosophy of nothingness can have a critical emancipatory potential in dis-
mantling reified structures and disclosing freer relations and possibilities. While
the partial deployment of nothingness empties and dismantles the individual,
 Asian Studies XI (XXVII), 1 (2023), pp. 27–50 47

who is left vulnerable to a reified collective identity, a more persistent practice of

emptiness would also contest such fixating collective identities.
The present restricted study of a distinctive era in the intercultural history of the
philosophy of nothingness leaves additional questions that can only be further ad-
dressed elsewhere. These concerns include the politics of nothingness and “Orien-
tal nothingness” in German and Japanese discourses and, to step beyond that his-
tory, the ethical and philosophical adequacy of a critical philosophy and ethos of
nothingness. First, the latter would not only empty the fixations of the individual
self but contest and empty fixating collective identities. Second, the distinctive-
ness and radicality of Daoist generative nothingness and Buddhist self-emptiness
is obscured in Hegel’s dismissive analysis of “Oriental nothingness” and in twen-
tieth-century justifications of it that remain beholden to Hegel’s logic of identity
and affirmation. Third, given the ongoing ideological functions of universalism
and multiculturalism, a more adequate conception and practice of intercultural
critique is needed that contests the misuses of both.
In the different yet interconnected cases of Heidegger and Kitayama, one can
repose Levinas’s concerns about Heidegger formulated in the 1930s and the in-
terrogation of the politics of Buddhist nothingness in imperial Japan by critical
Buddhist scholars such as Ichikawa Hakugen 市川白弦 (Levinas 1932; 1982;
Ives 2009). One can well question if Heidegger and Kitayama, respectively, at-
tained an appropriate ethics and politics of the other. If they express the “perfec-
tion of wisdom” in emptiness given how śūnyatā is not only a tranquil attunement
with and a letting releasement of things but intrinsically intertwined with an eth-
ics and responsive practice of compassion (karun.ā), loving-kindness (maitrī), and
generosity (dāna) toward the suffering world as evident in classic teachings of the
bodhisattva-path such as Śāntideva’s Bodhisattvacaryāvatāra and that Schopen-
hauer recognized, albeit in the language of an ethics of sympathy (Mitleid), in his
interpretation of the Buddhist dharma.26

Acknowledgement
I acknowledge and thank the RGC Humanities and Social Sciences Prestigious
Fellowship Scheme (36000021) and HKUST Innovative Exploratory Grant
(IEG20HS01PG) for the generous support that helped make this research and
publication possible. I am also grateful for comments and questions received on
earlier versions of this paper.

26 These points about Buddhism and Schopenhauer are developed in Nelson (2022, 83–96).
48 Eric S. NELSON: Martin Heidegger and Kitayama Junyū

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