DETERMINACION PRESUNTIVA

While Heidegger’s method of questioning often appears extraordinarily innovative, particularly with regard to the nothing, he is in fact rehearsing well-established problems within the Western philosophical and theological traditions. The question of the nothing has a long history stretching back to Parmenides and his refutation of non-being, or ‘the nothing’, in favour of being, or ‘the One’. Owing to its problematic stance towards the world of

appearance, Plato and Aristotle contest the Parmenidean position and argue for some form of becoming based on the necessity of non-being. This particular problem is engaged with in detail in Plato’s Sophist and Aristotle’s Metaphysics and finds its way into the Christian tradition through theologians such as Pseudo-Dionysius, Scotus Eriugena, Nicholas of Cusa and Meister Eckhart.⁷

Heidegger establishes that the ‘differentiation’ between being and beings requires an opposing procedure to bring beings into appearance. In order to permit beings to appear as distinct entities, the nothing or nothingness acts as the difference to being’s identity. Any description of this manner concerning the becoming of beings in relation to negativity not only engages with Greek and Medieval philosophy but also brings Heidegger into confrontation with German Idealism and the conception of the Absolute. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Stanley Rosen, Andrew Bowie, Gerhard Schmitt and Karin de Boer, among others, have testified to the fact that there is a robust relation between Heidegger and thinkers such as Kant, Schelling and Hegel.⁸ For Heidegger, although he does not use such terms for reasons that will become clear, the constitution of being must have what can only be described as a ‘dialectical’ or ‘speculative’

nature. The specific task of comparing Hegel’s Absolute with Heidegger’s term being is found in Hegel’s Concept of Experience, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, sections of Contribution to Philosophy as well as studies by Schmitt and de Boer.⁹ However, a simple equating of the two terms is not the purpose of any of the works cited; rather the conjoining factor of the two thinkers is the problem of the Absolute and the work that the Absolute performs. Indeed, the term Absolute is seldom, if ever, used to indicate Heidegger’s understanding of being. Nevertheless, Heidegger is investigating the conditions for beings to appear and is hence drawing upon transcendental idealist foundations that have sought to account for the appearance of phenomena by way of the ‘necessary conditions’ of consciousness, the Ego, Nature and absolute knowing.¹⁰ As Heidegger remarks, there are acceptable and unacceptable ways of approaching a direct comparison between thinkers.

After I myself had in the first place pointed to a remarkable connection between time and the I, several repeated attempts have recently been made to prove that the problematic of ‘being and time’ already exists in Hegel . . . The energetic efforts to prove that Being and Time is an old story should be a wholesome and moderating factor for its author . . . It is, however, quite different and decisive whether with such devious tricks we do Hegel a favour or even honour him . . . For the thesis that the essence of being is time is the exact opposite of what Hegel tried to demonstrate in his entire philosophy. The Hegelian thesis is the reverse: Being is the essence of time – being, that is, as infinity.¹¹

Both thinkers are seeking the ‘essence’ of the condition, that is, the condition that provides the ground for beings. Their foci are different but their objectives

aim at a foundational grounding in the Absolute or what Heidegger prefers to call ‘being’. This is not to say, as Schmitt appears to comment, that the standing of the condition is the same in each case. According to Heidegger’s interpretation of Hegel, ‘absolute knowing – that is, the mode of consciousness that has become ontological – is oriented upon presence (Anwesenheit) as much as the consciousness that it has left behind: the absolute reveals itself as absolute self-presence for and in absolute knowing’.¹² The term ‘presence’ is synonymous with traditional metaphysics and its propensity to evaluate ontology in terms of positive beings; thus, for Hegel, ontology is still metaphysical and absolute knowing as absolute self-presence is not commensurate with Heidegger’s notion of fundamental ontology. For Heidegger, metaphysics misconstrues the

‘unconditional’ or ‘self-conditioned condition’ (causa sui) for a fundamental ground and thereby marks itself as a thinking that seeks to evades its obligation towards its true origin: being. ‘A thinking that turns away from its true origin will increasingly come to regard itself as the ultimate ground.’¹³

Heidegger attempts to move beyond the self-grounding movements of German Idealism. However, the implications are severe. If being is not shackled by metaphysical claims of presence and self-conditioned ground, then being is neither self-conditioned nor can it be said to be unconditional. What is being? The status of being is undecided; however, Heidegger’s aim is to destabilize the self-conditioning structure of Idealism by employing the nothing against metaphysics as the essence of being that metaphysics cannot quantify.

Heidegger hopes to ‘unground’ metaphysical pretensions and pursue what he considered to be the ‘true’ conditions for the emergence of beings. Consequently, his task becomes one of describing or ‘working out’ a philosophical method that does not reproduce a metaphysical reliance upon beings and self-knowledge. The difficulty becomes an immense philosophical problem that has concerned the German tradition since Kant: how do we account for the world and the becoming of beings from the situation of already being in the world?

For Heidegger, the method, begun as a phenomenological analysis into Dasein, cannot be a logical form. As logic is already committed to the ‘positive’ content of thought and hence cannot gain insight into that which is prior to ‘things’; it cannot therefore comprehend the significance of the nothing. In order to impart itself as something outside existing metaphysical logic, the disclosure of nothingness is required to be intuitive or experienced in actuality in relation to the ontological activity of being. If this can be established, then a specified transition between the creative or formative aspect of the nothing and Dasein’s experience of that nothing is disclosed. The majority of What is Metaphysics?

aims at demonstrating this point and explaining a notion of transcendence that negotiates the distinctions between being, nothing and Dasein. The Absolute could then be defeated by detailing a phenomenon that transcends its boundary and exposes the limits of metaphysical absolutes at a general level.

For this reason, the ontological distinction between being and beings appears too ‘metaphysical’ to disclose beings as a whole without at the same

time espousing the nothing. If the nothing is excluded from the disclosure, then we are obliged (as was Hegel) to formulate the ontological distinction as a metaphysical hierarchy between existing beings terminating in an absolute self-conditioning ‘being’. Heidegger’s fundamental ontology is other than beings, which upsets the Hegelian hierarchical structure and yet claims a relation with being in or through Dasein. It is this complexity that Heidegger is seeking to express through recourse to the nothing. In respect of the nothing, it is an activity which is ‘in operation’ when allowing beings to appear, and Heidegger conveys this meaning through a construction new to the German language – nichten. The verb gives rise to two interesting English forms. Rosen translates nichten as ‘to nihilate’ whereas, owing to the intransitive nature of Heidegger’s usage, Michael Inwood favours the verb ‘to noth’.¹⁴ What both commentators agree on is Heidegger’s wish to separate the nothing and its nihilating activity from a purely negative interpretation predicated upon the not (das Nicht), that is, the act of negating beings. Although it cannot be described as a being, the nothing is a ‘something’ in itself and its activity is positive.¹⁵

Nothingness is included in the question of being, as the Seinsfrage indicates:

why are there beings at all, and why not rather nothing? What is interesting in this construction for Heidegger is the possibility that there could be another decision regarding beings: that they may not have existed at all and yet, curiously, they do. This use of the nothing to highlight the disclosure of beings is a development of a theme already existing in Heidegger’s thought at least as early as 1919. In the lecture course, The Idea of Philosophy and the Problem of Worldview, Heidegger expresses an early form of the Seinsfrage in terms of the question, ‘Is there something?’ The question lacks the appendage

‘nothing;’ however, it is already laid out in relation to a ‘lived experience’

(Erlebnis): ‘In this experience something is questioned in relation to anything whatsoever. The questioning has a definite content: whether “there is” a something, that is the question. The “there is” (es geben) stands in question, or, more accurately, stands in questioning.’¹⁶ However, while the wonder of beings generates in Heidegger the Seinsfrage, Wittgenstein and other logical positivists assert that, ‘This astonishment cannot be expressed in the form of a question.’¹⁷ Their quarrel focuses upon the use of the nothing as a meaningless linguistic form that Heidegger utilizes in order to direct philosophy towards a mythical or artistic description of the world – or that which is beyond it. Heidegger disagrees: for although the Seinsfrage presses upon the limits of language the question directs us to the appearance of beings as a whole exactly through highlighting the possible alternative:

nothing. As a term, the nothing is successful in unsettling the logical positivists for the very reason that it cannot be included in a positivist account. Therefore, the word nothing becomes an essential tool for the thinking of being that exceeds metaphysical accounts.