Heidegger

Richard Polt _Heidegger An Introduction_ p121 …

“What is Metaphysics?”: nothingness and the disintegration of logic

In 1929, on the occasion of his inauguration as professor at Freiburg,
Heidegger
delivered one of his most famous lectures, “What is Metaphysics?” This
concentrated,
powerful exploration of anxiety and its relation to nothingness owes
much to Being and Time, but its spirit is one of opening new questions and
provoking fresh thought. The lecture was not meant as a clear statement of a
doctrine, but as a challenge to philosophize.

In this regard, it had only mixed success. On the one hand, it attracted a
great deal of attention and soon became a key text for existentialists. One
listener reports, “When I left the auditorium, I was speechless. For a brief
moment I felt as if I had had a glimpse into the ground and foundation of
the
world. In my inner being, something was touched that had been asleep for a
long time” . 29

On the other hand, “What is Metaphysics?” led indirectly to Heidegger’s
banishment from the world of Anglo-American philosophy, and for decades
this banishment prevented most English-speaking philosophers from using
Heidegger as food for thought. For in this lecture, Heidegger makes two
statements
in particular that are calculated provocations. The first is the
pronouncement
das Nichts selbst nichtet: “Nothingness itself nothings”, or “The nothing
itself nihilates” (103).’ The second is the statement, “The idea of ‘logic’
itself
disintegrates in the turbulence of a more original questioning” (105). The
first
statement sounds like utter gibberish, while the second sounds like reckless
irrationalism.

So thought Rudolf Carnap, at least, who denounced Heidegger in his essay
“The Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language”
(1932). 31
For Carnap and other logical positivists, philosophy should clarify the
rules of
coherent, meaningful discourse. Meaningful discourse is scientific; it
expresses
objective facts in unambiguous propositions. Philosophy, then, is a system
of
propositions about systems of propositions in general. In other words,
philosophy
is logic, theory of theory. Now, some sentences seem to be neither
science nor logic - for example, “that flower is beautiful” or “justice is
good”
or metaphysical propositions such as “substantiality implies unity”. But
these
are just pseudo-propositions: they are nonsense, or at best, a symptom of
the
speaker’s emotional state. When we use the tools of logic to clean the
Augean
stables of philosophy, babble such as das Nichts selbst nichtet will be the
first
to go.

Through Carnap’s essay, which was widely read in the Anglophone world,
Heidegger’s philosophy got the reputation of being the worst sort of verbal
trickery, a wooly-headed and dangerously confused concoction that did not
deserve the name “philosophy” at all, and certainly was not worth reading.
For
example, in a popular history of philosophy, Bertrand Russell writes about
Heidegger:
————————————————-
Highly eccentric in its terminology, his philosophy is extremely obscure.
One cannot help suspecting that language is here running riot. An
interesting point in his speculations is the insistence that nothingness
is something positive. As with much else in Existentialism, this is a
psychological observation made to pass for logic.’
————————————————-

That is the entirety of Russell’s entry on Heidegger, and it expresses
everything
that most English-speaking philosophers felt they needed to know
about Heidegger until relatively recent times. An analytically trained
teacher of
mine once quipped, “The argument of Being and Time can be summed up
in three lines: a ham sandwich is better than nothing; nothing is better
than
God; therefore, a ham sandwich is better than God”. In short, Heidegger is
illogical - he says so himself - and thus is not worth taking seriously.
This
rather smug attitude is often extended to all “continental” philosophy (a
misleading
term, for the roots of analytic philosophy are at least as German as
they are British).

At this point, I recommend that readers turn to Heidegger’s brief essay
itself, and follow this carefully-constructed piece through its obscurities,
its
puzzlement, and its final question: “Why are there beings at all, and why
not
rather nothing?” Carnap’s essay is also well worth reading as a statement of
an
approach to philosophy that is diametrically opposed to Heidegger’s. One
may then wish to consider the following suggestions for how to interpret
“What is Metaphysics?” and how to adjudicate the conflict between Heidegger
and Carnap.

Heidegger’s lecture begins with an account of “our existence” as researchers
(94) and proceeds to the “metaphysical” issue of “the nothing” that he finds
in the background of our existence. (”Metaphysics” is an ambiguous term in
Heidegger. It refers sometimes to a tradition that needs to be overcome, and
sometimes, as here, to genuine thinking about Being.)
Heidegger starts by emphasizing science’s “submission to beings themselves”
(94-5). Good chemists, economists or historians all have this in common:
they
want to know what is the case, what is true and only that. They are devoted
to
beings alone - and nothing else.

Heidegger’s next move is precisely where Carnap saw the first logical
error.” Heidegger asks: “what about this nothing?” (95). “What is the
nothing?”
(96). He immediately anticipates that people will say he is just playing
with
words (95). In fact, he is playing with words: “nothing” does not mean the
same in “nothing else” and in “What is the nothing?” In the first phrase,
“not
anything” can be substituted for “nothing”; in the second phrase, it cannot.
But
Heidegger is not just making a pun: he is claiming that the first meaning of
“nothing” (”not anything”) is dependent on the second meaning that he is
about to explore.

Of course, Carnap would say that there is no second meaning: “nothing”
makes sense only as a way of expressing a negation, of denying something.’
We can see this in the ham sandwich joke. The proposition “A ham sandwich
is better than nothing” just means that eating a ham sandwich is better than
not eating anything. The proposition “Nothing is better than God” means that
there is not anything better than God. “Nothing”, it seems, reduces to the
“not”;
it has no independent reality apart from propositions. From the logical
point of
view, asking what the nothing is makes sense only as a question about how
negation works. If we keep insisting, as Russell puts it, “that nothingness
is
something positive”, then by trying to ask about nothing, we will fail to
ask
about anything. Here Heidegger anticipates Carnap’s objection: “the question
deprives itself of its own object” (96). 35

But can “the nothing” have another meaning aside from the “not”? Heidegger
now turns to the process of “nihilation”, as revealed in the experience of
anxiety. As he said in Being and Time, anxiety is not about any particular
being. 36 It is about beings as a whole. It is impossible to know all
beings, but it
is possible to feel the totality of beings in a mood (99). Profound boredom
reveals the totality as dull or repellent. The joy of love, when one sees
the
world in one’s lover’s eyes, reveals the totality as miraculous and
beautiful.

Anxiety, too, reveals beings as a whole in a particular way; as we put it.
in Chapter 3, in anxiety all entities seem irrelevant, inconsequential,
insignificant.
This disturbing meaninglessness is the “nothing” that Heidegger wants to
explore. In a way, Carnap is right: the nothing is nonsense. It is the
non-sense
that constantly threatens the sense of the world. If Being is the difference
it
makes to us that there is something rather than nothing, nihilation is what
tends to eliminate this difference. In nihilation, everything threatens to
lose its
significance: “All things and we ourselves sink into indifference” (101).

This may sound very abstract and nebulous. But to someone actually
experiencing
anxiety, it is much more concrete and powerful than any logical doctrine.
It affects our Being-in-the-world, and not just our propositions. For
instance,
teenage Angst, cliched though it may be, is a real phenomenon: young adults
often experience a crisis of foundations, in which the established
interpretation
of Being-in-the-world becomes unstable and unsatisfying. According to
Heidegger, this experience is always possible for Dasein.

Just as great art often comes from troubled artists, the nothing has the
potential to provide fresh illumination. It can help us recognize that,
despite
the threat of senselessness, there is a difference between something and
nothing.
Beings can now have more meaning than they did in the hackneyed, dull
interpretations
of everyday life. Being itself is now open to creative transformation.
————————————————-
Nihilation . . . discloses . . . beings in their full but heretofore
concealed
strangeness as what is radically other - with respect to the nothing.
In the clear night of the nothing of anxiety the original openness of
beings as such arises: that they are beings - and not nothing. [103]
————————————————-

This means that the nothing plays a role in Being. Being can be meaningful
only if there are limits to its meaning, a boundary where Being verges on
meaninglessness. “Being itself is essentially finite and reveals itself only
in the
transcendence of Dasein which is held out into the nothing” (108).

We can easily imagine Carnap’s response: if by “the nothing” Heidegger
means some sort of emotion, such as anxiety, then the expression is a
misnomer;
it does refer to something. However, it has no relevance to the universe at
large,
or to the nature of truth or Being itself - it just expresses one possible
subjective
attitude to life, perhaps an attitude typical of teenagers. Heidegger is
trying
to put this feeling into ontological language, when it would be expressed
better in music. 37 Or as Russell puts it, talk of nothingness is psychology
disguised
as logic. This is a serious charge (and especially ironic, in view of the
fact that the young Heidegger had himself argued against such
“psychologism”).

What is really at stake in this controversy? One crucial point is that for
the
logical positivists, there are some propositions that can be stated
objectively,
independently of the quirks and particularities of mood, language, and
culture:
“Einstein’s theories are expressible (somehow) in the language of the Bantus
-
but not those of Heidegger, unless linguistic abuses to which the German
language
lends itself are introduced into Bantu.”‘ Philosophy should be logic (not
anthropology, linguistics or psychology); it should study the rules of
objective,
scientific propositions.

Heidegger, in contrast, insists that all “unconcealment” is bound up with
mood, language and culture. Einstein’s theories are meaningful only to
someone
trained to approach nature in a certain way, the way of Western modernity.
Science requires a special mood and a special use of language. Facts are
always interpreted in terms of particular, historically grounded ways of
thinking:
“there are no mere facts, but . . . a fact is only what it is in the light
of the
fundamental conception, and always depends upon how far that conception
reaches”.”

Two common misinterpretations should be avoided at this point. First,
Heidegger does not deny that non-Westerners may participate in modern
science.
They obviously do, and very successfully. But according to him, this is
not because science is independent of culture, but because our planet’s
cultures
are being Westernized. Secondly, Heidegger is not a radical relativist
who would say that Einstein’s theories are on a par with astrology.
Einstein’s
theories are true: that is, they do unconceal things, and much more so than
astrology. However, this unconcealment is made possible for us by a
historical
context which, like all historical contexts, is limited and is open to
innovation.
Every theory inherits a past that both submits the theory to certain
prejudices
and makes possible other approaches that may someday prove to be more
illuminating.

Heidegger’s position, then, is that factors such as culture and mood are
always operative in the background of scientific statements. This is so
because
some particular way of Being-in-the-world is always at work, bringing with
it
some configuration of sense and non-sense, some relation to Being and to
nothingness that precedes and sustains our relationships to particular
entities.
As Heidegger explains in detail in Being and Time, our moods, which are
ways of experiencing our thrownness, disclose the world more fundamentally
than any propositions, affirmative or negative, that we may express. Our
sense
of beings as a whole is what allows us to take up particular relationships
to
entities, including scientific relationships. According to “What is
Metaphysics?”
we get a sense of beings as a whole, and of Being itself, when we
“transcend”
the whole of beings in anxiety and experience nihilation. This transcendence
makes it possible to relate to particular entities, including ourselves -
and thus
Heidegger writes, “Without the original revelation of the nothing, no
selfhood
and no freedom” (103).

This is why logic, as a theory of propositional truth, is not of primary
importance for philosophy. When Heidegger dramatically declares that logic
“disintegrates”, he means that logic can deal only with the surface
phenomena
of meaning - theoretical propositions. These would be meaningless without
the more primordial unconcealment that accompanies our existence. As we
are about to see, thinking about this primordial truth calls for an
investigation
of the mysteries of human freedom - and here, logic is no help to us.

We may have explained this controversy; we have not resolved it. As late as
1964, Heidegger speculates about “the still hidden center of those endeavors
towards which the ‘philosophy’ of our day, from its most extreme
counterpositions
(Carnap –> Heidegger), tends”. He proposes that he and the logical
positivists have some common ground. They are concerned with the same
questions: what is objectifying, what is thinking, and what is speaking?’
Today
logical positivism has fallen out of fashion, and Heidegger’s thought has
made
inroads into the English-speaking world. This moment should not mark the
beginning of a new, Heideggerian dogmatism. It should serve as an
opportunity
to ask the same questions that were asked by Carnap and Heidegger.

29. Petzet, Encounters and Dialogues, pp. 12-13.
30. Within this section of this chapter, parenthesized references will refer
to pages of “What
is Metaphysics?” in Basic Writings.
31. In A. J. Ayer (ed.), Logical Positivism (New York: The Free Press,
1959). Also in Murray,
Heidegger and Modern Philosophy.
32. B. Russell, Wisdom of the West (New York: Crescent Books, 1989), p. 303.
33. Carnap, “The Elimination of Metaphysics”, in Logical Positivism, Ayer,
pp. 69-70.
34. Ibid., p. 71.
35. “. . . even if it were admissible to introduce ‘nothing’ as a name or
description ofan–
entity, still the existence of this entity would be denied in its very
definition” (ibid.).
36. Being and Time, p. 230/185-6.
37. Music is the “purest” way of expressing an attitude to life “because it
is entirely free from
any reference to objects”: Carnap, “The Elimination of Metaphysics”, in
Ayer, Logical Positivism,
p. 80.
38. 0. Neurath, “Protocol Sentences”, in Ayer, Logical Positivism, p. 200.
39. “Modern Science, Metaphysics, and Mathematics” (from What is a Thing?),
in Basic
Writings, p. 272.
40. “The Theological Discussion of The Problem of a Non-objectifying
Thinking and Speaking
in Today’s Theology’ - Some Pointers to its Major Aspects”, in The Piety of
Thinking, tr.
J. G. Hart & J. C. Maraldo (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press,
1976), p. 24. On
the personal and intellectual relationship between Carnap and Heidegger and
their common
roots in neo-Kantianism, see M. Friedman, “Overcoming Metaphysics: Camap and
Heidegger”,
in Origins of Logical Empiricism, R. N. Giere & A. W. Richardson (eds),
Minnesota Studies in
the Philosophy of Science, 16 (Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of
Minnesota Press, 1996).

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