Thinking transdisciplinarily on a country path: rooting enquiry and pedagogy by learning from Heidegger and the Zhongyong (中庸)

This is a study of how the notion of thinking that Heidegger developed in his writing, especially Conversation on a Country Path about Thinking, can be read through a Confucian text to illuminate transdisciplinarity and how it might be taught. I briefly discuss the eurocentrism of continental philosophy, especially its lack of engagement with and respect for an Eastern philosophical perspective, then give the background of the chosen Chinese text. I next consider Heidegger’s position on thinking and draw insights from how we can both teach and enable transdisciplinary relatedness in university students. Learning to think is taken as inherent in the essential nature of humans and is a discovery of our own nature, as well as the nature of Being.1 This discovery, in What is Metaphysics, and Conversation on a Country Path, offers a way to unconcealment in the onto-cosmology of the harmony of all Being. It is essential to Confucian thought and to the fundamental ontology of Heidegger and, I contend, to forms of transdisciplinary thinking and teaching.