GLOBAL HISTORY OF IDEAS A SEA FOR FISH ON DRY LAND

by guest contributor Dag Herbjrnsrud

A remarkable example of how ideas migrate across so-called cultural borders and change minds in
unknown ways happened in the German city of Bremen on October 8, 1930. There, Martin Heidegger
gave a speech based upon his masterwork Being and Time (1927). Afterwards, he and several of
Bremens citizens gathered at the home of a wholesaler. During the evening, Heidegger suddenly
turned to his host and asked, Mister Kellner, would you please bring me the Parables of Zhuangzi? I
would like to read some passages from it.
Martin Buber (18781965) had already translated these parables of a founder of Daoism
(Taoism) in 1910 with the help of Chinese collaborators, one of his first acclaimed books, Reden und
Gleichnisse des Tschuang-Tse (Leipzig, 1910). Buber's afterword connects Zhuangzi (or Chuang Tzu/
369286 BC) with his reading of the Bible, and this can be seen as advance notice of sorts for his
later philosophy of I and You (Ich und Du). It was this book that Heidegger demanded.
The tradesman didnt hesitate but went to his library and returned with a new edition of Bubers
translation. Heidegger started reading from Zhuangzis chapter 17, which in this context might be seen
as a follow-up to his own speech On the Essence of Truth. Heidegger read from the passage where
Zhuangzi says to the thinker Hui Tzu, known for his Zeno-like paradoxes, as they walk by a river:
Do you see how the fish are coming to the surface and swimming around as they please?
Thats what fish really enjoy.
Youre not a fish, replied Hui Tzu, so how can you say you know what fish really enjoy?
Zhuangzi said: You are not me, so how can you know I dont know what fish enjoy.
The people of Bremen could relate to this 2200-year-old Chinese conversation. As an
eyewitness described it: The deep meaning of the legend cast a spell on all who were present. With the
interpretation he offered of that legend, Heidegger unexpectedly drew closer to them than he had with
his difficult lecture....
Heideggers and Bubers dialogue with the thinking of Asia seems to prove that Arthur O.
Lovejoy was right when, in the first issue of the Journal of the History of Ideas in 1940, he pointed out
that ideas are the most migratory things in the world. Human thoughts are like fish that swim as they
please. There are no borders underwater. The connections in our minds transcend modern categories in
unknown ways, and thus our ideas migrate across ages and seas from Zhuangzis ancient town of
Meng in eastern China to Kellners modern home in northern Germany.
And Heidegger seems to have proved that ideas are the most migratory things in the world long
before he became internationally famous. When he studied in Freiburg with the philosopher Shuzo
Kuki (18881941) from Japan, Heidegger read Edmund Husserl's major work with him and other East
Asians once a week, as he stressed in one of his late major texts, Aus einem Gesprch von der
Sprache. Zwischen einem Japaner und einem Fragenden (1959) (A Dialogue on Language between a
Japanese and an Inquirer) set out as a conversation between two professors. By that time, in 1921,
transcripts of Heidegger's classes were already translated into Japanese, which might be regarded as the
first recognition of his groundbreaking philosophy. Indeed, Japanese was the first language Being and
Time was translated into in 1939, a staggering twenty-three years before the first English translation.
If we re-read Heideggers 1927 work from such perspectives, we might understand why many
East Asian philosophers feel more at home in his thinking than most Europeans. As he concludes: One
must seek a way of illuminating the fundamental question of ontology and then go this way. Whether
this is the sole or right way can be decided only after one has gone along it. This insistence on finding
and going the way in order to seek the essence of being, might be hard to grasp with a so-called
Cartesian or modern perspective, trying to make philosophy a part of science, but it seems all the more
natural from Zhuangzi's point of view and the way of thinking about the Way (Dao).
After the Hitler era, Heidegger concludes much of his wandering in Unterwegs Zur Sprache
(1959) (On the Way to Language). In that work he explains his 40-year-long quest for a deeper, pre-
philosophical source which connects us as beings across time and space: The word way probably is
an ancient primary word that speaks to the reflective mind of man. The key word in Laozis poetic
thinking is Tao, which properly speaking means way []. He concludes: The lasting element in
thinking is the way. In this way the thinking of China and Japan breathes in Heidegger's philosophy.
Europe's foremost thinker of the 20th century cannot be properly understood without knowledge of
Asia's philosophy.
Heideggers universal quest might also be something for our times. Heidegger was seeking a
thinking experience which would assure that European-Western saying and East Asian saying will
enter into dialogue such that in it there sings something that wells up from a single source. And he
walks the walk in the dialogue with his friend, as when he finds out that the Japanese word for
language, koto ba, is the best way to better understand his own language, German.
Thus, both Zhuangzi and Heidegger formulated central challenges and opportunities for the 21st
century. Zhuangzi by asking us to see the Others, understand what they enjoy, and acknowledge it.
Heidegger by asking us to seek a way to understand his thinking, his transcultural roots, and his search
for a common human ground. Or as professor Reinhard May puts it: In order to gain a new
perspective from this Heidegger case, we will have to devote ourselves to other peoples thinking as
thoroughly as to that of our own tradition, not least since Heidegger has, in his own special way,
demonstrated the necessity of transcultural thinking.
In this light we can also see how Heidegger questioned the basis of our modern thinking in
Brief ber den Humanismus (1947) (Letter on Humanism): Philosophy is hounded by the fear that
it loses prestige and validity if it is not a science, Heidegger wrote. And again he returned to a fish
metaphor: Thinking is judged by a standard that does not measure up to it. Such judgment may be
compared to the procedure of trying to evaluate the natures and powers of a fish by seeing how long it
can live on dry land. For a long time now, all too long, thinking has been stranded on dry land.
He didnt write it explicitly, but this metaphor seems to be a reference to another of Zhuangzis
parables (number 6): When the springs dry out, the fish are found stranded on the earth. They keep
each other damp with their own moisture, and wet each other with their slime.
Vital parts of our migratory history of ideas have become stranded on dry land since the
encounter in Bremen. At the same time, a new awareness might be dawning of the importance of our
long-forgotten global interconnectedness as can be seen from Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartoris
Global Intellectual History (2013) or Jonardon Ganeris Why Philosophy Must Go Global: A
Manifesto (2016). The history of ideas can also learn lessons from the new insights now being
presented in the field of global history and the de-centering of perspective, or from earlier times: The
universalism of Mozi, or the argument for world literature by both Goethe and Nobel laureate
Rabindranath Tagore.
The world is not just connected by trade, as Hajime Nakamura pointed out in A Comparative
History of Ideas (1975). Even more importantly, humans are bonded by those migratory ideas that
transcend national and cultural borders. And as Heidegger showed, we dont have to meet physically in
order to face each other. In the global history of ideas we can rather stand face to face through texts
across ages and seas.
Such a history of ideas has the potential to give us new and fresh ways of looking at our world,
as the participiants at the gathering in Bremen found out. This is not just because there is no such
thing as western civilization, or eastern civilization for that matter, as Kwame Anthony Appiah puts it.
It is also because new research frequently proves that our cultural heritage is often not what we are
taught to believe. Heideggers critique inspired the Algerian-born Jacques Derrida to develop the
German term Destruktion into the French concept of dconstruction. As the time and being of the
21st century drags on, it might be about time to add reconstruction to deconstruction.
A reconstruction of our natural and common global history of ideas can be seen as a fulfillment
of the thinking of Zhuangzi, the first deconstructivist. He disavowed the ideologies of rulers and the
hierarchies of scholars that imprison the human mind, leading individuals astray from their own innate
nature (hsing). The stringent argument that we are being taught is logic is far too often nonsense
because, rather, eclecticism is all. The eclectic, comparative, and inclusive way of thinking pours water
over stranded fish, making reconstruction a flow of the natural way (wu wei ). If we follow the
way of Zhuangzi and read the classics anew, we can reconstruct our past based not on an ethnocentric
take, but rather on a comparative and transcultural perspective placing weight on our migratory ideas.
Instead of studying history of ideas within a national or ethnic framework, we might re-orient and be on
the way to reconstruction with the help of three C-terms: Contact. Comparison. Complexity.
We might for example see the way Thomas McEvilley has shown how the pre-Socratics and
Plato were influenced by the thinking of India, a country where the secular and materialistic Lokayata
(Carvaka) philosophy has prevailed for over 2500 years (Contact). Such global and comparative
perspectives on the world of ideas can release us from the ethnocentrism that has left our thinking
stranded on dry land for all too long now. If we follow such channels of thought, we discover that it
was not Athens, nor any Greek city-state, that Aristotle hailed as the best-governed or most democratic.
Instead, in Politics, he held up Phoenician Carthage, in modern-day Tunisia, as the state with the best
constitution, the most stable rule which was not prone to tyranny and as the place where the people
had the most say when it came to electing politicians (Comparison). As the second US president John
Adams pointed out in A Defence of the Constitution of Government of the United States of America
(1787): This government [of Carthage] thus far resembles those of the United States of America more
than any other of the ancient republics, perhaps more than any of the modern... (Complexity).
Thus, the reconstruction of a global history of ideas makes the founding fathers and the basic
documents of our past ripe for rereading from a comparative and non-ethnocentric perspective. Man is
not an island and neither is the world nor have they ever been. Rather, man is a fish, ever in danger of
being stranded on dry land. But the springs can be refilled, opening up new channels of thought so that
more fish can swim as they please just as a simple question taught the merchant Kellner, Heidegger,
and their guests how to enjoy swimming in the vast seas of the global history of ideas.

Dag Herbjrnsrud is a historian of ideas from the University of Oslo with a cand. philol. thesis on the
late philosophy of Robert Nozick. He is the author of the book Globalkunnskap (2016, Global
Knowledge. Renaissance for a New Enlightenment) at Scandinavian Academic Press, and the founder
of the recently established Center for Global and Comparative History of Ideas (SGOKI).