Abstract

Heidegger’s metaphorics of ‘way’ (Weg) and ‘home’ (Heim, House) offers a perspective for understanding both the epistemic and existential aspects of all thinking and philosophizing. His senses of ‘way’ (Weg), ‘waying’ (wëgen, Bewëgung), and ‘woodpaths’ (Holzwege) point to the epistemic character of thinking, whereas the ones of the ‘uncanny’ (Unheimlichkeit), ‘homelessness’ (Heimatlosigkeit), and ‘homecoming’ (Heimkehr) – to its existential motivation. Way as pathway and method, waying as clearing and way-making, and woodpaths as ways with no proper beginning and end link thinking and philosophizing to a phenomenology of movement, or a peculiar type of epistemic journey. For its part, the uncanny state of Dasein in ‘anxiety’ (Angst), later seen as the essential homelessness of the historical man, conditions thinking and philosophizing existentially along a “conquest of the earth” and the “cosmic space,” which would secure – upon a long waying – its anticipated homecoming. Remarkably, a similar sense of waying and homecoming can be isolated in the key concepts of Lao-tse’s Tao-Te Ching. Most generally, for Lao-tse, Tao is the ‘way’ of all existence and Te stands for one’s individual adherence to that way. While Tao remains “beyond the power of words” and is thus ‘wu’ or nothing, it nonetheless designates the harmony and balance of all there is -- all beings. It is thus also the way of Te, of one’s mind and body, thinking and living, which dispels all strife and tension to ensures one’s harmonious and peaceful co-existence with the rest of the world. In this sense, Te can be seen as one’s ‘way’ to and one’s ‘home’ in the harmony of Tao, whereas to the extent that Te becomes pressing in a possible loss of Tao, an actualized Te as a search for Tao is also one’s ‘waying’ and ‘homecoming’. That thinking and philosophizing can be aptly apperceived within the metaphorics of waying and homecoming, can be also attested by the first record of a conjoined usage of ‘philos’ and ‘sophia’, which is found in Herodotus’ Histories. Herodotus uses the verb ‘philosopheîn’ broadly in the sense of love to learn (a conjecture of both existential and epistemic meanings) and links it to traveling around the world “for the sake of seeing” it. Thus, in this primordial usage, philosophy can be seen as a ‘journey’, which within our terms here can be seen also as including ‘waying’ and ‘homecoming’.