ABSTRACT
From the early 1920s onwards, a steady stream of philosophers from Japan trailed past the Black Forest into Marburg and Freiburg to study with Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Heidegger himself had maintained that he had worked with Japanese scholars from early on, 'but had learnt more from Chinese'; it was from this engagement with Lao-tzu, along with Confucius and Mencius, that he had come to know more about the East. As Heidegger abandons the phenomenological project, he increasingly seeks to return to that ground of the metaphysical tradition via the route of the history of Being: the thinkers he selects for this return are mainly Heraclitus, Meister Eckhart, Hölderlin and, of course, Nietzsche. Furthermore, Heidegger was familiar with the linguistic connections between the old Indian Sanskritic and German-speaking traditions. Richard Rorty charges that the Heideggerian project embeds Heidegger's own search for essentialism: this typifies the ascetic priest in Heidegger.
