Fall 1999 Cyberseminar in Objectivist Studies:
"The Continental Origins of Postmodernism"

Week 2: September 20-26

BRYAN REGISTER ON HEIDEGGER'S "WHAT IS METAPHYSICS?"

Sent: Monday, September 20, 1999 7:34 AM

Subject: Cyberseminar: Heidegger Review - BR

[From: Bryan Register ]

Getting a Grip on Nothing


Heidegger, Martin. "What is Metaphysics?" in Krell, David. ed. *Martin
Heidegger: Basic Writings*. HarperCollins: New York, 1993.

I want to lay out what I understand to be the basic structure of the
argument, along the way dealing with some misunderstandings to which I
think Heidegger's writing will lend itself, especially with this audience. I
should note at the outset that my intrepretation tries to place the lecture
in the context of *Being and Time* (B&T), which Heidegger assumed his
audience had read when he gave the lecture. Also, I give a very Sartrean
reading; if my interpretation is off, this is liable to be why.

Heidegger takes his lead from science. Science rests in and on a context of
other ways of engaging the world, of which metaphysics is the most
fundamental. Science without metaphysics is without a guide and is
threatened with disintegration. Heidegger suggests that science claims to
study the world, but that this is always contrasted with what science does
not study, the nothing. So, to fully understand science and its context, we
must get a grip on the nothing.

I think that Heidegger is employing a version of the stolen concept
argument (the 'stolen contrasting concept' arugment). When we debate, say, a
dream sceptic, we might point out to him that he can't say "Maybe everything
is only a dream," because in order to form the concept 'dream', he has to
have contrasted dreams with something which is not a dream, that is,
reality. So it's not possible that everything is a dream because the dream
sceptic is implicitly assuming a knowledge of reality (and thus that there
is a reality) in uttering his doubt. So he has stolen the concept of
'reality'. Likewise, for Heidegger, to say that one studies only the world
is to demand a contrast object against which we define the world. That
contrast object is the nothing. So science has, as it were, stolen the
concept 'nothing' and used it as an implicit contrast object while denying
any concern with it.

This argument is especially interesting in light of David K.'s suggestion
that we be careful to attend both to making explicit the contrast object of
any concept, and also that we attend to the conceptual common denominator of
a concept and the concept(s) whose units are its contrast objects. The only
available contrast for 'being' is 'nothing', but of course being and nothing
share nothing in common (pun intended for Heidegger's sake). So I suggest
that this argument should be looked at in relation to ITOE pgs. 58-61 and
149-150, about the concepts of 'existence' and 'nothingness'.

Heidegger is perfectly aware of the basic logical objections to trying to
speak of nothing. First, if we ask 'What is the nothing?" and then expect
an answer of the form "The nothing is...", then our answer is going to tell
us what the nothing, which isn't anything, is. So something's gone wrong.
Further, thought is supposed always to have an object, whereas the nothing
is not an object. So not only can't we speak of the nothing, we can't think
about it either (it's not there to be thought about).

It is worth pointing out that the word 'logic' does not appear a single
time in this essay without scare quotes around it. I don't think that what
Heidegger has in mind is getting rid of logic as such. Rather, look at it
this way. If we had a logic which did not allow for the expression of
material conditionals, then we would be forbidden from arguing like this:

A, and if A then B, thus B

because we would not be able to say 'If A then B' because that's the
inexpressible material conditional. The problem is not with logic, but with
whatever so-called and inadequate 'logic' is popular at the time.

Or, to put it another way. It's apparently impossible, in logical
discourse, to discuss a predicate. Take a predicate like term like 'red'.
Now, in order even to specify that this is a predicate, we would have to say
"Red is a predicate." But of course in that sentence 'Red' was the subject.
We rightly don't take this to actually indicate that predicates can't be
identified as predicates; only that we have to finesse the logic and
grammar a bit to make it so that we can predicate over predicates. (I'm
drawing from Frege's "On Concept and Object," which I'll confess I don't
fully understand.)

(A brief digression: Heidegger is traditionally taken as an enemy of logic,
and that that is the use to which he's been put by some of the
postmodernists. But it's worth noting that Heidegger changed his mind
substantially over the course of his career. So the later Heidegger can be
an enemy of logic, while the early Heidegger is merely suspicious of
'logic'. If I'm mistaken, the textual basis for a refutation of my
interpretation has to come from other early writings, such as B&T.)

Heidegger has an answer to these two objections. He says that "...the
nothing is the negation of the totality of beings; it is nonbeing pure and
simple. But with that we bring the nothing under the higher determination
of the negative, viewing it as the negated." (p. 97) The idea is that 'the
nothing' expresses just what we get when we perform the mental, logical act
of negation on everything. But then we have in fact gotten the nothing from
a logical act performed on a contentful mental state (or on the content of
the mental state, if you prefer). So the logical objections don't work
after all.

Now that the logical objections have been dealt with, Heidegger moves on to
suggest that the nothing is, after all, prior to the mental act of
negation. On face, this move is troubling; it seems that, while he may have
established that we can speak of the nothing because it is the result of
negation, this hardly establishes that we can speak of a nothing that was
not the result of negation. By referring back to the stolen concept
argument, though, I think that this might work out better. That is, the
concept of the reality that we negated had to be formed against some
contrast object, which was the nothing. So the nothing is simultaneous with
the reality which we negated to get the nothing. I think the back-and-forth
about logic is really more polemical; there's something wrong with your
logical system if it both insists that the nothing cannot be spoken of and
allows you to speak of the nothing. (Another argument (p. 98) seems to run
off of a Meno paradox: since we're now asking about the nothing, we have to
already have known the nothing. We have to have known this before we got to
the nothing by negation, because we had already asked about the nothing.)

The key argument for this point, on p. 99, runs that "...the nothing is
nothing, and if the nothing represents total indistinguishability no
distinction can obtain between the imagined and the 'proper' nothing." What
Heidegger is doing is assuming two nothings, one prior and one posterior to
the act of negation. The posterior (proper) is the one arrived at by
negation of reality; the other one (imagined) is a kind of original
nothingness, not arrived at by any prior process. But it would be silly to
have two nothings, especially if you don't think you can have even one. So
the proper nothing and the imagined nothing turn out to be not different
from one another. So you can't reject just one of them, and you're
obligated by the negation argument to accept one of them. So you have to
accept both.

Then he moves on to an argument about how we would arrive at an experience
of the nothing. Such an experience would be on a parallel with an
experience of the whole of being. The latter experience, Heidegger thinks,
is possible, because however much we may be caught up with a single entity,
we are always caught up with it in its context. For instance, even if I am
caught up right now with a single book, pencil, and computer, through their
relationships with the rest of reality I am by means of them caught up with
all of reality. Boredom and joy at the presence of a beloved are
experiences in which all of reality are experienced more directly. In
Heideggerian boredom, we are not bored with any particular thing, we are
bored, plain and simple, with the world. And when we enjoy the presence of
the beloved, we might say that we are experiencing the world as a good
place, we enjoy being alive (being in the world) just as such. (I've just
been playing with a kitten and I think it's kind of the same thing.)

Likewise, there is an experience in which the nothing is directly given us,
and that experience is the mood of anxiety. Anxiety, in this sense, is not
anxiety about anything in particular, but about nothing in particular (or:
about, in particular, nothing). (It would have been nice for Heidegger to
tell us in this particular lecture that anxiety is the mood we feel in the
face of death, but he is assuming that his audience is familar with B&T.)

So Heidegger thinks that the nothing is given us directly in the experience
of anxiety, which in turn is the mood in which impending death is felt: "We
'hover' in anxiety. More precisely, anxiety leaves us hanging because it
induces the slipping away of beings as a whole. This implies that we
ourselves - we humans who are in being - in the midst of beings slip away
from ourselves." (p. 101) The nothing is what death must seem like from the
point of view of the potentially dead. It is important to understand that
the death in question is one's own from one's own point of view. Other
deaths, which are mere phenomena in the world (the set of objects) have
nothing in particular to do with the nothing. Only one's own death gives one
anxiety in the face of the nothing.

I think that the argument runs: Try to imagine death. You can't do it any
better than you can imagine the nothing; yet we don't say that death is
impossible to talk about. You might follow the analogy and say that we can't
talk about death, either. But then Heidegger can ask: what don't you mean by
this 'life' that is the standard of value? Against what contrast object did
we form 'life'? What is it we're trying to put off in our efforts to stay
alive? So if Heidegger is successful in suggesting the parallel between the
nothing and one's own death, then we either have to give up talking about
death (and thus life) or admit that we can talk about the nothing.

Heidegger moves on to try to answer his question (How is it with the
nothing?) now that he is assured that it makes sense to ask the question in
the first place. He says that the nothing is not some object as distinct
from other objects. The nothing kind of sits on top of beings; it is a
feature of them: "...the nothing makes itself known with beings and in
beings expressly as a slipping away of the whole." (p. 102) The nothing is
that feature of a being made salient when it is considered absolutely out of
all context. Imagine that the world has totally disintegrated and that all
context has been rendered useless. That's the nothing. The possibility,
inherent in each thing, that it can be (mentally) taken out of context is
the nothing.

For Heidegger, the relevant context is the teleological one; the context in
which things as appear as tools or means to ends. So the nothing is what
appears when things cease being means to ends. Now, the absence of one
particular thing is what is required for something to lose its place in the
teleological context: the thing which imposed that context on it, the human
subject. This shows the intimate connection between one's own death and the
nothing. The nothing is what is there for you if you aren't. Or, to put it
another way, let's say that you, who are a subject to objects, are taken out
of the context of all objects. That's what death is, but that's also the
nothing.

Now Heiddegger turns to 'nihilation'. Nihilation is one kind of negating.
Nihilation is negating something's being oneself; it is the realization,
about everything in the world, that it is not one; that one is not it.
Heidegger says that "The nothing itself nihilates. Nihilation is not some
fortuitous accident. Rather, as the repelling gesture toward the retreating
whole of beings, it discloses these beings in their full and heretofore
concealed strangeness as what is radically other - with respect to the
other." (p. 103) Nihilation is the act of noticing that, whatever is, is not
what one is. Since nihilation is an act of noticing and thus must be
performed by a human subject, and since it is the nothing which nihilates,
one is nothing. The terms 'the nothing' and 'the subject' are
co-referential.

Apparently, Heidegger thinks of the subject as a kind of hole in the
universe, a gap or absence. This is a rather stark version of the
Aristotelian doctrine that the intellect is composed of pure matter, so that
it is nothing in particular and can therefore take on the form of external
objects.

This is why Heidegger says that "Without the original revelation of the
nothing, no selfhood and no freedom." (p. 103) There's no selfhood without
something that isn't the self, so to have a self we have to realize what
the self is not. That's everything (all objects which can be given to one);
the self is nothing. Further, were the subject something, then it would be
governed by causal laws and would thus not be free.

The prior part is handled in Objectivism by the notion that 'the intrinsic'
(as I'll call it; whatever is not a subject or yet an object) can become an
object to us only in a causal interaction with us, and so that it is only
because the subject is not nothing but is a something with particular
causal powers that there are objects and, thus, a subject.

The second part is not so well dealt with, as far as I can see. Objectivism
wants to say simultaneously that everything is caused and that we are free,
because freedom is a form of causal determination. This is supposed to work
because the causation which determinists oppose to freedom is
event-causation, whereas the actual causes of free actions, as with all
other events, are properties (of entities).

Let me explain. Imagine that an event occurs in which an entity is the
subject of the event, and the event occurs in virtue of the entity
possessing a certain propery. If that were true, then the event would have
to occur as soon as the property was a property of the entity. There could
be no delays, because it's the *property* in virtue of which the event
occurs. Nevertheless, there are delays, so there must be some additional
component in causation. Now, when we ask what the cause of an event is, we
are typically asking "What event occurred just before the event in question,
such that, had that event not occurred, neither would the event in
question?"

Let me use an example. A glass is knocked off a counter, and when the glass
hits the ground, it shatters. Now, if we ask what is the property of the
glass in virtue of which it shattered, the answer is (say) "It was fragile."
But this can't be complete, because the glass was fragile before it fell.
The falling seems to be crucial, but the falling was an event. So the notion
that an entity's properties are a sufficient cause of events in which it is
the subject is inadequate.

Now, since free actions happen at the appropriate time, which is
whenever a relevant event occurs, it seems that we are determined by
external events (and properties which we possess). Now, unless we can
determine which events will occur around us (and which properties we are
going to possess), then we are determined by things outside our control and
thus are not free.

Heidegger (I think) would say that you *can* determine which properties
you're going to possess, because you are nothing. Being nothing, you have no
identity, and can thus pick any properties you like. (Obviously, this would
be constrained by the body and by logic [without scare quotes].)

Heidegger concludes with a putting-into-context of the question of the
nothing. For Heidegger, all metaphysical questioning returns to the
subject, who is an inherently questionable thing. Uniquely, we are free and
can die, so the question of our being continually arises in questions like
"What shall I do (as opposed to doing something else)?" and "Why am I here
(as opposed to nowhere)?"

He also says that it is only on the ground of nothing that beings exist.
This is liable to be misunderstood. If I correctly understand B&T, what
Heidegger means is that, were there no human subject, then there would be no
principle of individuation. Things are independent entities because we make
them that way; without us to individuate things, there would simply be being
absolute. Further, nothing would be anything, because we would not be here
to distinguish things' natures.

Here's an Objectivese version of the argument, drawing from DK's paper on
propositions. Without a human subject to perform abstraction, nothing is
abstract; that is, no feature is abstracted from the entity of which it is a
feature unless a human subject so abstracts it. Now, for facts to obtain,
there must be a human subject handy to abstract a feature from an entity,
and then reintegrate the feature to the entity (with a proposition). So the
distinction between an entity and its identity which grounds facts relies on
a human subject, and is thus objective rather than intrinsic. A thing
doesn't have distinct properties without someone around to distinguish them.
Thus, without a subject to perform this distinction, then there is literally
no identity; just raw existence, the absolute. Identity exists only relative
to a subject. As with identity at the conceptual level, so with
individuation at the perceptual level; no distinct entities which have not
been distinguished from their background by a distinguisher. (Obviously this
is going to need some clarification, which I'll be happy to provide when the
unclarities are pointed out.)

So when Heidegger says that the nothing is prior to beings, he means the
nothing qua subject, not qua hole in the universe. So I don't think that
this point rests on his claim that the subject is the nothing. Or, to put it
another way, the stolen-concept argument may establish that 'the nothing' is
conceptually simultaneous with 'being', but this latter argument fails in
establishing that the nothing (qua nothing) is ontologically prior to
existence, though it may establish that the subject (qua subject) is
ontologically prior to identity.

So I think that Heidegger presents us with three very basic questions.
1) Can there be some concept without of that concept having been
distinguished from contrast objects? i.e., 'existence' without 'nothing'
2) Can we be free if we are governed by causal law, or must freedom be an
exception to all law?
3) What is the relation of ontological dependence between consciousness and
the identities of its objects?

In all three cases I tried to defend Heidegger's point of view, but I think
that clarification will be necessary, so I reserve the right to continue
playing devil's advocate until the matter seems to me to be fully clarified.

Finally, I hope that the focus of these notes don't distract from the focus
of the seminar. I know that we're looking at Heidegger as progenitor to
postmodernism, rather than as progenitor to existentialism, but I know about
existentialism and I don't know about postmodernism. So I wrote toward what
I know. The commentators may find it best to focus on questions about mood
and logic, as I suspect these are the features of the lecture which will be
most pertinent to the subject matter of the seminar.

Bryan


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Fall 1999 Cyberseminar in Objectivist Studies

All Cyberseminar posts are working papers with copyright
reserved to the author. They may not be published or adapted
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