Recovering the Mystery: Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Cooper, Dao and Zen

In identifying a ‘vision of mystery’ as central to the later work of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, and relating this to certain Daoist and Zen texts, Recovering the Mystery seeks to throw light on the notion of a meaningful human life.

Wittgenstein and Heidegger do not try to answer traditional (Western) philosophical problems. Rather, their literary strategies are directed towards the reader regaining what Kierkegaard would have called a ‘primitive impression’ of their existence, within which the problems are ‘dissolved’, can no longer find intelligible expression. This is for both thinkers a recovery of the mystery of the giving of human life and the reality that life reveals. This ‘vision of mystery’, and its associated forms of articulation, relates their work to older East Asian, Daoist and Zen writings, a connection made in the work of David E. Cooper. Through an exposition of these Western and Eastern texts, Recovering the Mystery seeks to uncover the consequences of this vision for our understanding of a meaningful human life.