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Several fundamental problems emerge from a reading of What is Metaphysics?

and although Heidegger approaches these difficulties in a unique fashion, these claims relate to authentic questions raised by the metaphysical tradition.

I summarize them as follows:

The problem concerning the origin of distinctions

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The problem of transition between beings and their condition

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The problem of transcendence: what is transcended and what is given in

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transcendence?

The problem of the ‘essence’ of the condition of beings

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I have suggested that the ontological distinction between being and beings is a distillation of the problems listed above. As Löwith remarks in the opening of this chapter, in so doing Heidegger reduces all metaphysical categories to the single distinction between being and all beings. The grounds for Heidegger’s reduction become clearer when we approach his work as a series of steps that relate to the quest for a fundamental ontology. Therefore, the challenges posed by the origin of distinctions, transition, transcendence and the essence of the condition are implicit in Heidegger’s ontology. Heidegger understands metaphysics as a discipline for thinking and resolving fundamental problems rather than one caught up in identifying categories and producing logical

proofs for those categories. However, for many commentators, it is not clear that Heidegger is progressing further than traditional metaphysical interpretations.

To begin with the first question raised, the problem of distinctions, the situ-ation briefly stated requires that we account for Dasein’s ability to distinguish between every being and between itself and the whole of beings. Heidegger’s radical insight is to suggest that ‘distinction itself’ requires an origin. This thought process can be traced to a Socratic or Platonic mode of questioning which, upon encountering a phenomenon, seeks the unity behind that phe-nomenon. When Socrates is forced to judge between, for example, two or more occurrences of the same virtue the question is asked, ‘How do we know that they are the same?’ The assumption is that there is a common or primary element that secondary phenomena merely share in. Socrates is led, through engaging with the world, to the concept of virtue ‘in itself’. Likewise, Heidegger asks similar questions even if his intentions ultimately lead us elsewhere: if there are a multiplicity of distinctions in the world, then how do we recognize all by the name ‘distinction’? Heidegger’s reduction concentrates his thought in a single question, is there not a ground of all distinctions and all beings?

For Habermas, it is not clear that Heidegger is advancing a new form of philosophy at all. According to Habermas, Heidegger’s primary problem is,

‘How to dissolve the transcendental subject without eroding the world of difference that the subject works out’.⁵³ What is Metaphysics? demonstrates Heidegger’s desire to maintain difference yet dissolves all difference into a single inexpressible origin. Habermas regards this methodology as ‘inverted Platonism’, where the relationship between subject and object has been reversed. Habermas accuses Heidegger of elevating the category of world (as found in Being and Time) over and above subjective distinctions to achieve a hypostasized world-structure named ‘being’.⁵⁴ While this strategic manoeuvre allows Heidegger to develop an ontological structure that goes before the subject and makes it possible, for Habermas, world and the activity of world-disclosure is a repackaged form of objectivity inherent to metaphysics. Further-more, the centrality of an ontological conception of transcendence indicates Heidegger’s metaphysical need to break out of isolated categories and ‘go beyond’ the world of subjectivity towards objective being. Because Dasein and distinctions remain important to Heidegger, his philosophy shows evidence of metaphysics and an inverted use of the philosophy of the subject.

Heidegger’s answer to this form of criticism is established in terms of a temporal differentiation in experience – a ‘happening’ – rather than a concept of distinction. Metaphysical distinctions remain at the level of mathematically founded concepts. The ontological distinction is required to be both experiential to Dasein and grounding, that is, ontology is required to disclose a necessary truth and universal structure regarding the world. Therefore, Heidegger’s challenge is to uncover a fundamental foundation that is also relevant to experience. However, Heidegger’s internal difficulty is that the ‘origin’ or

condition of beings is deemed to be other than the ‘thingy’ distinctions between beings. This category distinction is necessary for his critique of the history of philosophy as a history of presence. In order to re-describe the dominant philosophy of his day, Heidegger is required to explore different solutions.

Therefore, Heidegger is attempting to modify the function of transcendence.

To transcend out of the subject towards beings is a form of transcendence that relates to subjectivity. However, to transcend beings themselves towards an origin or condition of beings bears closer resemblance to theology or a type of metaphysics that transcendental philosophy has already left behind.

Heidegger is objecting to the traditional rendering of metaphysical attempts to transcend towards another ‘being’, but is affirming a category of transcendence that ‘steps-back’ towards an understanding of being. Nonetheless, when Heidegger describes being or the nothing as an ‘entity that is not a being’, it exposes him to charges of metaphysical abstraction or mysticism. Nonetheless, although Derrida criticizes Heidegger’s use of the ontological distinction as an inherently metaphysical category,⁵⁵ he also recognizes that Heidegger’s use of being and transcendence ‘are nothing but necessary yet provisional movements’

on Heidegger’s path to his later philosophy.⁵⁶ It remains Heidegger’s belief that traditional metaphysics has been unable to convey the conditions for beings to appear except by way of another ‘being’. Heidegger is upholding his conviction that the condition for beings cannot be exposed through a rational investigation into those beings. Therefore, we revealed a problem of transition between the beings that we experience and the condition of those beings in being. If beings are presented as a problem to be resolved through the unearthing of the ontological condition, then how is the ‘condition’ disclosed?

Heidegger utilizes the nothing to overcome this problem rather than attempt-ing to unify or identify beattempt-ing and beattempt-ings immanently, that is, through statattempt-ing that they are the other of each other and that they require no further explana-tion to account for their reciprocal grounding. Through rejecting this posiexplana-tion and arguing for a fundamental distinction between beings and their condition, Heidegger draws the problem of transition into his fundamental ontology and at the same time provides an effective resolution by broaching the problem of transcendence. Transcendence alleviates the problem of transition through providing an account of how the ontological distinction is given to us in experience. The condition for the emergence of beings is related to Dasein by means of the nothing and the ontological category of Angst. Being and nothingness, as conditions for the becoming of beings, gain an identity that is indissoluble. However, Connor Cunningham sees a logic of nihilism in this identification which proliferates the errors of Western metaphysics and termin-ates in nihilism. Heidegger unifies and grounds his ontology by reducing the identity of difference to an essential monism that is nihilistic in the sense that Heidegger ‘makes nothing appear as something’ and thus conceals the origin of beings.⁵⁷ For Cunningham, this logic of identification is repeated through-out the Western tradition.

Nevertheless, before we accuse Heidegger of replicating the error of German Idealism and unifying the highest elements of his philosophy into a self-grounding identity, the ‘being-nothing’, I suggest that Heidegger’s identificat-ion occurs beyond beings in the realm of being. This point is significant in respect of Heidegger’s condemnation of reason. The purpose of Heidegger’s attack was to undermine our fixation with beings and expose reason’s limita-tions regarding conditionality. If the condition of beings is beyond beings, then it is credible to suppose that it also beyond reason. Heidegger, therefore, attempts to approach the condition via other means, and I suggest that Heidegger’s identification of being and nothing occurs beyond the jurisdiction of beings and therefore beyond causal relations and rational critique. At this instant, metaphysical convention breaks down and this is the situation that Heidegger wants to inspire. Heidegger is not attempting to make nothing appear as something, he is using the nothing to expose the limits of reason but claims that this path does not terminate in meaninglessness. Rather than conclude in a monism of nothing, Heidegger is following the lead of Schelling in rejecting rational categories and attempting to speak of the unintelligible that is beyond reason. In seeking the reason for beings we are led away from them, as it were, into the ‘nothing’.⁵⁸

[T]his incomprehensibility, this active resistance to all thinking, this effectual darkness, this positive inclination to obscurity. [Previous philosophy] would have preferred to get rid of the uncomfortable altogether, to dissolve the unintelligible completely into understanding or (like Leibniz) into representation.⁵⁹

Like Schelling, Heidegger is attempting to correct a philosophical flaw that occurs when we struggle to penetrate into the origin of things through reasoned argument. This fails to provide for a true distinction between beings and their condition and also conceals the condition itself by covering over the radical nature of this thought with rational edifices. The enmity Heidegger displays towards this manner of thinking suggests that he is hostile to a purely immanent ontology. For Heidegger, the condition of beings cannot be another being;

hence transition is still required, as is the necessary activity of transcendence. If we are to name Heidegger’s attempt to reveal the condition of beings in What is Metaphysics?, then he appears to be describing a transcendent ontology.

However, this analysis is challenged by Rosen’s claim that we are encounter-ing an immanent transcendence in Heidegger’s thought.⁶⁰ Rosen’s concentrates on the logical implications of rejecting an ‘absolute nothing’ in favour of Heidegger’s qualified nothing that has a distinct function. However, because the nothing is not absolutely nothing it ‘exists’ and must be a thing, a ‘count-able’. Rosen describes absolute nothingness as being truly uncountable and hence infinite. Therefore, das Nichts is the ‘other of the nihil absolutum’.

Moreover, as we have now described both the thesis and antithesis of the

nothing, and also because Heidegger identifies nothingness with being, Rosen deduces that there are two alternatives: the finite (being and nothing) and the infinite (absolute nothingness). We have been drawn back into the circle of Hegelian logic. Hence, Rosen concludes that we have two choices: ‘either to return to Hegel’s logic of contradiction, or to abandon ontology’.⁶¹ Nonethe-less, the grammar of Heidegger’s argument is structured so as to bring us into confrontation with the condition for the emergence of beings, and in discard-ing the nils absolutum (and the identification of bediscard-ings with a material condition

‘in being’) he is describing the essence of that condition as an authentic neces-sity which is neither absolute nothing nor is it material being. It is in some man-ner the ‘becoming condition’, that is, the condition that bridges the world of being and non-being. Although he is sympathetic to Heidegger’s project at some junctures, it is Rosen’s rational approach that lends a certain blindness to his analysis. However, the accusations of immanence and/or transcendence are germane, and if Heidegger is intent on disclosing the condition of beings, then the machinery of his method should be unearth. If transcendence is a funda-mental movement in Heidegger’s philosophy, then in order to investigate the allegation of immanence we can legitimately ask, what is transcended and what is given in transcendence?

Heidegger’s position on transcendence states:

Holding itself out into the nothing, Dasein is in each case already beyond the beings as a whole. Such being beyond beings we call transcendence. If in the ground of its essence Dasein were not transcending, which now means, if it were not in advance holding itself out into the nothing, then it could never adopt a stance toward beings or even toward itself.⁶²

Transcendence is both part of the essence of Dasein and also of the nothing.

Transcendence appears to be essential for adopting a stance towards beings and towards Dasein itself (self-consciousness). Moreover, as we have understood being and nothingness to constitute an identity, the fact that transcendence is essential to the nihilating of the nothing also implies that transcendence is fun-damental to being. While this explanation appears to furnish Habermas with more evidence of Heidegger’s basic metaphysical orientation, Heidegger claims he is uncovering the activities of being that are required to bring beings ‘to’

Dasein and therefore to appearance. Therefore, Heidegger asserts that he is explicating the ‘essence’ of the nothing (and hence being) owing to it being a condition for the emergence of beings. The essence of the nothing comprises of tran-scendence. Consequently, nihilation is the ‘transcendence of the nothing’, and the essence of the nothing – that which separates it from all other ‘entities’ or nonentities’ – consists in revealing its ‘existence’ through transcendence. The nothing is required to indicate its ‘presence’ through the activity of nihilation.

Heidegger portrays much of Western thought as a static tradition that is prone to separate essence from existence through methodological errors and

contrasts this narrative with an active account of essence. An active description of essence replaces the essence of traditional metaphysics, which could be described as the unchanging permanence in time. Heidegger supplants this description with a temporalized essence which ‘acts’ in time. Heidegger’s meth-odology alludes to a foundational problem in traditional metaphysics: if we are hoping to describe the essence of a thing through naming attributes and then seeking to unify those attributes through time, then a foundational structure is required that enables this process to emerge. If we cannot account for how this process emerges, then our methodology is in error. For Heidegger, this process is problematic at the level of the condition of beings. If we are asking the ground of beings to reveal its essence in the same manner as a tree or an attribute such as virtue, then we are asking something to disclose itself as that which it is not:

we are asking that which is not a being to display the same characteristics as a being. Ground does not necessarily have attributes or unity in the manner of beings. It is not necessarily a stable phenomenon nor is it necessarily an unchanging presence in time.

For Heidegger, in Being and Time, beings, entities and presence itself require time. The noun is replaced by a verb-based definition of an ‘entity’ that is known through its effects: being ‘beings’, essence ‘essences’, a thing ‘things’. It is this form of essence that Heidegger hopes to describe when expounding statements such as ‘the nothing nihilates’. Furthermore, Heidegger’s notion of transcend-ence is also consistent with this definition of esstranscend-ence. The fact that the nothing transcends conveys the nothing as a function of its activity or, to be more pre-cise, activity is the essence of the nothing. As the activity in question is transcendence, then so too is transcendence the ‘essence of the nothing’.

A relation opens up whereby the nothing communicates itself to us through the disclosure (one could almost say through the ‘use of’) its essence: the activity of nihilation as transcendence, the transcendence of the activity of nihilation.

The elements of Heidegger’s analysis merge into one transcending-nihilating-activity.

Heidegger appears to have dealt with the problem of transition raised above by defining transcendence as existing within the essence of the nothing: the nothing both unites and separates, reveals and conceals as part of its essential activity. The thought is radical because it seems to demand that the essence of fundamental ontology should include the activity (or existence) of transcend-ence. However, this account resembles a speculative description of God that includes God’s existence within His essence without contradicting the fact that God is not a being among others. While Heidegger’s narrative of the nothing provides an alternative to some of the foundational problem in the Western tradition, as we have discovered, it is not without its own difficulties. Neverthe-less, the redeeming moment in Heidegger’s position springs from the fact that beings in the world are an essential element of his ontology. It makes no sense to talk of the nothing without beings. Once you are interested in beings a set of problems arise such as ‘what do things have in common?’ and ‘what causes

things to exist?’ and talk of the nothing is a fruitful way of attending to these problems. What is most apparent to Dasein is that there is not nothing, but rather there is being. That experience requires elucidation. Although an absolute nothing remains a conceptual possibility, it has no place in experi-ence. While language begins to fail the description, Heidegger’s nothing has

‘form’ and ‘function’, it displays the characteristics of a ‘what’, a ‘something’

that is not a being. Moreover, our enquiry into the nothing suggests that existence functions with a form of necessity that completes the activity of being and nothingness. Transcendence, then, is not an activity of ‘surpassing’ or

‘going between’ as such (whether between God and man or being and beings);

transcendence, for Heidegger, is an ontological activity that is required by the essential activity of each of its parts: its embodiment is ‘systematic’.

When the question of the nothing is approached in terms of the fundamental problems that it addresses, it becomes clear that Heidegger is seeking to transform foundational concepts in metaphysics. Through pursuing the noth-ing Heidegger is also overcomnoth-ing long-held beliefs or misconceptions that have sustained Western thought since its inception. Consequently, a salto mortale between the real and the ideal or the finite and the infinite is not required, as the separation between being and beings is no longer absolute and the onto-logical ground of beings is nearer and more essential to existence than a radical separation would first suppose.

Chapter 3