However, there still remains a "naive" question: if entities are there as Real prior to Lichtung (clearing), how do the two ultimately relate? Lichtung had somehow to "explode" from the closure of mere entities--did not Schelling struggle (and fail) with this ultimate problem in his Weltalter drafts, which aimed at deploying the emergence of logos out of the proto-cosmic Real of divine drives? Are we to take the risk of endorsing the philosophical potentials of the modern physics whose results seem to point towards a gap/opening discernible already in the pre-ontological nature itself? Furthermore, what if THIS is the danger of technology: that the world itself, its opening, will disappear; that we'll return to the prehuman mute being of entities without Lichtung?

It is against this background that one should also approach the relationship between Heidegger and Oriental thought. In his exchange with Heidegger, Medard Boss proposes that, in contrast to Heidegger, in Indian thought, the Clearing (Lichtung) in which beings appear does not need man (Dasein) as the "shepherd of being"--a human being is merely one of the domains of "standing in the clearing" which shines forth in and for itself. Man unites himself with the Clearing through his self-annihilation, through the ecstatic immersion into the Clearing. This difference is crucial: the fact that man is the unique "shepherd of Being" introduces the notion of the epochal historicity of the Clearing itself, a motif totally lacking in Indian thought. Already in the 1930s, Heidegger emphasized the fundamental "derangement (Ver-Rücktheit)" that the emergence of Man introduces into the order of entities: the event of Clearing is in itself an Ent-Eignen, a radical and thorough distortion, with no possibility of "returning to the undistorted Order." Ereignis is co-substantial with the distortion/derangement, it is NOTHING BUT its own distortion. This dimension is, again, totally lacking in Oriental thought--and Heidegger's ambivalence is symptomatic here. On the one hand, he repeatedly insisted that the main task of Western thought today is to defend the Greek breakthrough, the founding gesture of the "West," the overcoming of the pre-philosophical mythical "Asiatic" universe, against the renewed "Asiatic" threat--the greatest opposite of the West is "the mythical in general and the Asiatic in particular." On the other hand, he gave occasional hints as to how his notions of Clearing and Event resonate with the Oriental notion of the primordial Void.

P. 10-11

¶ 4:55 PM