Abstract

The relevance of Heidegger’s existentialist analysis of Dasein does not consist in its exhaustive understanding of man’s existential structure but in its suspension of cultural tradition by means of phenomenological reduction in order to show an existentialist aspect of that structure, namely being-toward-death. The Chinese cultural tradition, however, discloses another existentialist feature of man, namely perpetual thriving or shengshengbuxi. We intend to separate the existential experience from the exposition of that cultural tradition in order to make an existentialist analysis of perpetual thriving and thus to demonstrate a different existential horizon: here Dasein is no longer uncanny but is at home from the beginning; family is not only a basic form of social organization but represents an existential structure that passes from generation to generation; filial piety, the principal virtue in the family, reveals the continuity characteristic of life as well as the generative mechanism of ethics in the Chinese cultural tradition. Moreover, the analysis of the continuity of life in terms of perpetual thriving also shows the existentialist generative mechanism of politics, ethics, Bildung, attitude to life, and sense of history.