Dasein and 'The Book of Tea'

Forty-two years ago, when I was ever so young, working as an export documentations clerk for Frank P. Dow and Co., Inc. (shippers' brokers and Customs House agents) in San Francisco, living in a single room in a seedy, but not yet totally trashed-by-negroes hotel on lower Eddy Street, just up from Market Street, I used often to stay on week-ends with my friends Hugh and Betsy Tinling, their lovely dogs and nice kids, in their idyllic house outside of Santa Cruz. One Sunday afternoon, as I was getting ready to go back to The City, they handed me as a parting gift a beautiful illustrated copy of Kakuzo Okakura's The Book of Tea. They said they knew I would like it--It was just my kind of book. And they were right. I loved it. I virtually memorized it. It very much reminded me of a Lin Yutang translation of of a Sung Dynasty essay 'On Tea and Incense,' with which I had been familiar since I was fifteen years old. When over the next two or three years I began to read the writings of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu, it seemed as if I were reading things that I already understood--only in greater detail. It is not too much to say that I understood (and that I yet understand) The Book of Tea perfectly.
Fast-forward forty-two years. I have of late been paddling about in the feculent cesspool of Postmodernism, scornful of what I do understand, incredulous of what I don't. Beginning with Heidegger: It's only fair to say that I've read almost nothing of Heidegger from the source--I find Being and Time preposterous, even at the most carefully explicated second-hand. I make absolutely nothing of being-in-the-world; I cannot see that existence, so defined, is any less a willfully or inadvertently stupid predicate than anything proposed by Thomas Aquinas. I utterly disbelieve that "since Plato, all Western thought has been of the subject/object variety." Und so weiter, und so weiter...mere, pretentious lunatic twaddle. But then in my reading about Heidegger, I found this extraordinary anecdote:


"In 1968, [Gadamer] invited Tomonobu Imamichi for lectures at Heidelberg, but their relationship (both had been pupils of Heidegger) became very cool after Imamichi pointed out that Heidegger had taken his concept of Dasein out of Okakura Kakuzo's concept of das-in-dem-Welt-sein (to be in the being of the world) expressed in The Book of Tea, which Imamichi's teacher had offered to Heidegger in 1919, after having followed lessons with him the year before. Imamichi and Gadamer renewed contact four years later during an international congress."

First: Why the coolness? I've read substantially the same anecdote in several places now--Why did Gadamer (in my opinion not usually so idiotic as his lieber Meister) act like an utter fool when told that Heidegger had stolen virtually his entire Shtick, without acknowledgement, from a (then) fairly obscure work of Oriental philosophy?

Second: I remember not one thing in The Book of Tea of such fatuous meaninglessness as Heidegger's Dasein. Most strange, however, and, I think, most disquietingly significant, is the fact that not one of those who have related this story of Heidegger's plagiarism, and of Gadamer's infantile discomfiture at having it found out--nay, not one--has said exactly what it was that Heidegger found in the exquisitely evocative English (It was written in English) original that he turned into such leaden piffle.

Habemus Stellam Matutinam

It's
It's Venus in her Inferior Conjunction, which is surprisingly both more luminous and brighter than her Superior Conjunction. The picture of Michelle Obama and Her Sovereign Majesty the Queen having a bit of a cuddle is rocking blogspace and the world. Unlike Jimmie Carter's assault on the late Queen Mother, this embrace was initiated by the queen, and (as even protocol permits) only reciprocated by Michelle, and discontinued at the queen's instance--who looks, in my opinion, a tad unnerved by it. Truth to tell, Elizabeth II's real nature is Taurean, ruled by Venus, and it shows: Utmost respect for the physical, natural, goddess-given side of existence, and considerable impatience with jejune formalistic immaterialities.