Heidegger, Rorty, and the Eastern Thinkers

Book excerpt: Wei Zhang joins the ongoing hermeneutic quest for understanding and appropriating the East-West encounter and cross-cultural engagement by exploring Martin Heidegger's and Richard Rorty's cross-cultural encounters with Eastern thinkers. Zhang begins by examining Rorty's correspondence with Indian philosopher Anindita N. Balslev, outlining their debate about the discipline of comparative philosophy and curriculum reform, as well as the nature or origin of philosophy itself. She then focuses on the dialogue between Heidegger and a Japanese professor concerning the nature of human language and discusses whether Heidegger's view of language allows for a true understanding between East and West or whether it admits only misunderstanding and prejudice are possible. Finally, the author presents a conceptual dialogue with Heidegger's primary text on hermeneutics and phenomenology, Ontology—The Hermeneutics of Facticity. Utilizing the dialogues and correspondence between Heidegger, Rorty, and the Eastern thinkers as textual examples, Zhang deconstructs and recovers layers of misconceptions of the various interpretations of the East-West encounter.