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

Heidegger’s next move is precisely where Carnap saw the first logical error [P. 23]. Heidegger asks: “what about this nothing?” [P.95]. “What is the nothing?” [P.96]. He immediately anticipates that people will say he is just playing with words [P.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” [P.96].

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. [P.185-6] 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 [P.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” [P.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, clichéd 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.

Pp. 123-124

Continued.  ¶ 11:39 AM