Abstract

The modern age is the constructive age of self-consciousness and self-closure. The system of closure is only possible with the repression of difference. Postmodernism operates at the margins of the system of closure and searches for irreducible difference and radical otherness. Hence the characteristic of postmodernism is de-constructive. At issue in this postmodern spirit is; what is the most forgotten "other" in Western thinking. This is the starting point of our inquiry for a dialogue between Western and Eastern thought. Since Western thinking is Being-centric, its repressed difference is nothing. "Nothing" has never been seriously thought in Western onto-theology. In formal logic , the question of nothing is devalued as the negation of identity. Though in dialectical logic negation is elevated as the highest category of Being, difference as difference is never though about. In theology, nothing is considered an evil to be overcome by either God as Being or Christ as God's kenotic event . With Nietzsche, ontotheology comes to an end, and Nothing comes to the fore as nihilism. However, Nietzshe never asked about the essence of Nothing, but thought about Nothing nihilistically within the realm of metaphysics. With Heidegger's deconstructive step-back from metaphysical thinking, nothing is thought as nothing at the line of difference. Difference itself is the crossed line of Being, the Open of a-letheia, the between line of Being and Nothing. Heidegger's thinking of difference as such provides a significant foundation for the dialogue between East and West. Difference as such is the absolute Nothingness without reification. Buddhism calls this Sunyata that is the essence of pratityasamupada and Nagarjuna's "middle." Also Heidegger's Being can be understood as Lao-Tzu's Tao. Why is Heidegger's deconstructive thinking parallel to Siniticism? What is the perceptual common ground of their dialectic of difference? The thinking of Heidegger and Siniticism predominately operates in what Walter Ong calls oral/aural perception against chirographic/typographic perception. In the oral/aural perception, nothing is not no-thing as "not-seeing" , but silence as "emerging-enduring-power"