James Luchte on Heidegger, Carnap, and nothing.

[I]n the context of the “ontological difference,” the nothing, as it indicates transcendence, intimates a transcendental dimension of existence, and, contrary to the limitations of Kant, not merely as a negative phenomenon, but one that participates in the positive constitution of being-in-the-world. This is further indicated in Heidegger’s project of a “destruction of the history of ontology” (read ontical metaphysics) in which the nihilating power of the nothing clears the ground by which the topos of primordial questioning – philosophy – can be retrieved. Indeed, the upshot of Heidegger’s foray into metaphysical questioning is that traditional metaphysics must be overcome as it does not allow for the disclosure and expression of a more primal or radical questioning. And, for Heidegger, logic and empirical verification are propped up and embedded in this traditional metaphysics even though they have attempted, with those like Carnap to apply Ockham’s razor to the worst excesses of speculation.

In this way, Heidegger is attempting to disclose a diversity of existential topoi, and his novelty of expression is an attempt to indicate a phenomenological region that has for all-too-long been forgotten. In his 1949 edition of “What is Metaphysics?,” Heidegger laments that the “nothing” has been our best word for the transcendental, while re-affirming the significance of the no-thing as that which, as with Being, is elsewhere than the ontic realm of beings. One of the most significant differences between Heidegger and Carnap is apparent in their respective treatments of anxiety. For the latter, it is merely emotional, for the former, it is ontological, even a “structural” methodology for the disclosure of a differing, deeper sense of truth. For Heidegger, Carnap’s failure to ascertain the possibility of differing regions of philosophical truth is itself a repetition of traditional metaphysics and the forgetfulness of Being. In other words, Carnap may have secured his island, but he has lost the world. And, in this light, it is far from certain if Carnap’s criterion of application, this amalgam of formal logic and empirical verification, has any real power against the existential phenomenology of Heidegger.