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

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. [P.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” [P.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. [P. 23] 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” [P.272].

Pp. 124-125

Continued.  ¶ 5:10 PM