{2} Continuing “What is Metaphysics?”: nothingness and the disintegration of logic by Richard Polt.

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 ame “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 [P.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” [Pp.94-95]. 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.

Pp. 122-123

Continued.  ¶ 2:54 PM