Echoes Of No Thing: Thinking Between Heidegger and Dōgen

Echoes Of No Thing: Thinking Between Heidegger and Dōgen

Nico Jenkins
Role: Author

Echoes of No Thing seeks to understand the space between thinking which Martin Heidegger and Eihei Dōgen enunciate in their writing and teachings. Heidegger most clearly attempts this in Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event) and Dōgen, the 13th-century Zen patriarch, does this in his Shōbōgenzō, a collection of fascicles which he compiled in his lifetime. Both thinkers draw us towards thinking, instead of merely defining systems. Both Heidegger and Dōgen imagine possibilities not apparent in the world we currently inhabit, but notably, find possible, through a reorientation of thinking – a soteriological reimagining of that very world – clearings for the presencing of an authentic experience in the space which emerges between certainties. This is explored through a close reading of their conceptions of time and space, and as a listening to the echoes that resonate between the two thinkers.