In this short but rich article, delivered as a lecture in 1929, Martin Heidegger investigates metaphysics in a startling and idiosyncratic manner that is deliberately provocative and intentionally abstruse. Not only does Heidegger illuminate the question of metaphysics, but this piece serves as a valuable introduction into his work.
At the outset of the lecture Heidegger brazenly declares that the question, What is Metaphysics?, “awakens expectations of a discussion about metaphysics. This we will forego.” This, I suspect, was a deliberate joke to provoke an immediate sense of unease from the start. As we shall see, Heidegger’s approach to the questions he raises - and there are a lot of questions forthcoming - involves a great deal of unsettlement, bewilderment and confusion, as if the world is topsy-turvy.
Indeed, Heidegger opens his inquiry with a quotation from Hegel: philosophy is the “inverted world” when considered from the point of view of ‘common sense’. For Hegel, the inverted world occurs when consciousness no longer places truth in the external world of things and objects, but locates truth instead in the thinking subject. 1This thinking subject is what Heidegger calls Dasein, a term that notoriously does not translate directly into English but means ‘human-being-there-in-the-world’.
Heidegger will towards the end of the essay finish with another quotation - from The Science of Logic - demonstrating Hegel’s importance to Heidegger’s own philosophy, which draws from everyday usage of language and experience to try to show how it can reveal metaphysical truths.
Therefore, by foregoing a general discussion about metaphysics - presumably something that would involve a prior definition and some banal preliminary remarks - Heidegger places us, Dasein, at the centre of the investigation.
His inquiry has a twofold aspect:
1) “Every metaphysical question always encompasses the whole range of metaphysical questions. Each question is itself always the whole.
2) Therefore, “every metaphysical can be asked in such a way that the questioner as such is present together with the question.”
Dasein is the being that questions Being. We are the entity that exists which calls into question the meaning of existence. We are the ones who can ask why there is something rather than nothing, who question what it all means, in a way in which a sentient creature such as a pet cat or dog cannot. This opens the way to a more profound understanding of human being than what the traditional sciences have offered.
We live in a world dominated by the sciences, even more so than in Heidegger’s time. He was not against science as such, but he regarded the sciences as missing out on aspects of our fundamental nature.
Biology, mathematics, psychology or sociology help humans to investigate the world through their “irruption” or “breaking into” the world of beings. We investigate this or that phenomenon, historical period, equation, etc., and this has been useful for it has enabled humans to map out the world in all its complexities.
Yet, for Heidegger, science has been limited as “a delineated submission to beings themselves.” Science in its rootedness has “atrophied”, i.e. withered away or decayed. Through pursuing science, man has “forgotten” (a term Heidegger uses in Being and Time) his own Being. Science is leaving something out. “What should be examined are beings only, and besides that - nothing; beings alone, and further - nothing; solely beings, and beyond that - nothing.”
Science has dedicated itself to investigating the world of beings and stops, for there is nothing beyond. “What about this nothing?” Heidegger asks. Will this nothing give us any clue to the nature of Being? Or is it just a figure of speech?
Science thinks so: “[it] wishes to know nothing of the nothing,” declares Heidegger. It rejects the nothing as a nullity. As science is concerned solely with beings, talk of the nothing is nonsense: “The nothing - what else can it be for science but an outrage and a phantasm?” This is science’s conclusion about the nothing: “we know it, in that we wish to know nothing about it.”
Heidegger takes a radically different perspective. He has already shown that even in its own conception of itself, science has recourse to the nothing (“...and nothing else besides”) such that even in our existence as determined by science the question of the nothing is still there. Heidegger will show how we encounter the nothing, but in an original way. Heidegger’s argument is like Hegel’s critique of Kant: saying that something is unknowable is already saying something about it.
Science, to be sure, has discussed the nothing, but conceives of it only in terms of what there is not. To ask what is the nothing is absurd, because it is talking about nothing as if it is a being. “Interrogating the nothing - asking what and how it, the nothing, is - turns what is interrogated into its opposite. The question deprives itself of its own object.”
Logic itself disavows the question. ‘Thinking’ is always thinking about something and acts “in a way contrary to its own essence” when thinking about the nothing, but Heidegger wants to tamper with the rules of logic. Are we sure we want to brush the intellect aside? Is there something wrong with how we have thus far thought about the nothing? Does the nothing come after the not and negation, or it is the other way round? To the intellect, “nothing is the negation of the totality of beings; it is nonbeing pure and simple.” To the intellect, nothing comes after negation.
(As I wrote earlier, Heidegger pursues questions to their limits. His writings, regardless of what you may think about his conclusions, always encourage you to think.)
Heidegger insists that, contrary to the original conception, the nothing is more original than the not and negation. “Negation as an act of the intellect, and thereby the intellect itself, are somehow dependent on the nothing.” He wonders how science and the scientific attitude, with its “blind conceit”, can even cope with the question of the nothing. “We must be able to encounter it [the nothing],” he says, and asks where we are to seek it. Heidegger answers that our confrontation with the nothing is not going to come from the intellect. He is instead going to locate the faculty or area of consciousness that is capable of grasping the nothing as mood.
For Heidegger, we already encounter the nothing through our everyday speech, through “idle talk”, as a word we “rattle off every day”. The nothing “glides so inconspicuously through [the] chatter” of “Das Man”, or the “They”, the crowd of modern society.
This accords with Heidegger’s account in Being and Time, in which Being is revealed through everydayness, as a haunting of our being. (Hegel’s procedure in the Phenomenology of Spirit works in a similar way: the proof of speculative philosophy is to be found in everyday activity.)
We are thrown, to use Heidegger’s word. In our everyday existence we experience moods or attunement, such as joy or boredom, but these moods obscure the nothing from us. However, Heidegger thinks that moods can enable us to find a way into the nothing.
The nothing we “rattle off” is merely an “imagined nothing” however. It is actually impossible, Heidegger asserts, for us to imagine this abstract nothing that is the total negation of all beings, because we are unable to think of all beings, all the manifold instances of being, in the first place. We are finite and mortal.
There are, however, times when we do encounter beings as a whole. This whole appears only in a shadowy way, such as in genuine boredom. Not boredom, as Heidegger says, with this or that particular book or play, but a fundamental ennui, such as when we might think or say: Nothing moves me, nothing interests me. “Profound boredom, drifting here and there in the abysses of our existence like a muffling fog, removes all things and human beings and oneself along with them into a remarkable indifference. This boredom reveals beings as a whole.” [My emphasis.]
Traditional philosophy has often treated moods as an afterthought, but for Heidegger it is through mood that we become “attuned” and find ourselves among beings as a whole. Thus mood/attunement allows us to access everyone else, whilst also allowing “the nothing we are seeking” to be “concealed”. Being attuned is like a radio picking up a signal, and this for Heidegger is a fundamental occurrence of Dasein.2
Interestingly, Heidegger also posits another mood, that of joy or elation and human love, but he does not elaborate further. IIt is, though, entirely of a piece with his gloomy existentialist outlook.
The most fundamentally revealing mood, however, Heidegger takes from existentialist philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. This is the concept of anxiety (Angst). You can also term it as dread. This is not anxiousness as such about a specific thing (fear about a driving test, a spider or heights, for example) but the fundamental dread that nothing has any meaning.
This mood of anxiety gets to the very core of Heidegger’s philosophy. It is fundamental to the human condition. We cannot escape it, for we are, in the famous phrase, “thrown into the world”, the world of the “They” (Das Man), mass man - the anonymous buzzing, confusing world we are hurled into. All the abstract They-ness, that conformity, means nothing. Our anxiety stems from our attempt to deal with this nothingness.
For Heidegger, we attempt to flee from the nothing with busy-ness: the “idle talk” or “chatter” he wrote about in his book Being and Time. The nothing eats away. We flee from it and repress it so that we do not have to think about notions of freedom. We turn to social media, gossip and all manner of distractions. Mass culture is a monstrous machine spewing forth incessant iterations of this chatter. We can become preoccupied with just one region of being and become blinded by surface glare, unable to reach a profound understanding of life. Our attempt to flee, even if we want to be authentic (to use another Heideggerian term) itself causes anxiety.
In anxiety, one feels unheimlich (ill-at-ease, or literally not-at-home). All things sink into indifference where “nothing matters”. Things slip away from us and close in on us at the same time, as in the reverse-zoom effect in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and other films. We slip away from ourselves and the only thing left is pure Dasein. Genuine anxiety is an uncomfortable revelation. Everything we thought we are or were is stripped away; we cannot hold on to anything. “In the lucid vision sustained by fresh remembrance we must say that that in the face of which and for which we were anxious was ‘properly’ - nothing. Indeed: the nothing itself - as such - was there.”
We are now at the most controversial part of this lecture. Heidegger elaborates on the nature of the nothing, but the problem of course is that talking about the nothing seems like trying to describe the sound of silence. Little wonder, then, that Heidegger spoke of the “bewildered calm” that pervades anxiety. Nevertheless, in questioning mode again, he wants to “interrogate” the nothing.
Nothing is a repelling - this is the action of the nothing. “The nothing itself nihilates.” I think of this as a shadow that swallows everything in darkness. It is not the same as annihilation; that is, it is not destruction, but an ever-enveloping dark fog. Think of the mood of depression, where sufferers despair at life and let it slip away through their inactivity. They don’t do anything as such, but the doing nothing eats away at their life.
The nothing encountered through profound anxiety “discloses beings in their heretofore undisclosed strangeness as what is radically other - with respect to the nothing.” The things we took for granted in everyday life, all now seem alien to us. For Heidegger this brings Dasein to the for. Dasein is held out into this nothing, a being beyond beings in a moment of transcendence. For, in the heart of dread is the moment of freedom. If nothing has any meaning, it is up to us to make our own meaning.
In other words, we as Dasein must face up to the nothing, as revealed through Angst, and use this revelation to forge our own selfhood. The nothing is at the heart of Being.
This Angst is always there, often only sleeping. It “quivers perpetually through Dasein,” and takes daring to confront it and thus “preserve the ultimate grandeur of existence,” for this anxiety “stands … in secret alliance with the cheerfulness and gentleness of creative longing.” Anxiety and creativity go hand-in-hand. Any artist should be able to relate to that. Though I don’t think Heidegger is only speaking to artists: anyone from any walk of life can take inspiration from this message.
The parallels here with Nietzsche’s philosophy should be apparent - unsurprisingly since Heidegger was a great admirer of his. The theme of the nothing also recalls Nietzsche’s famous epigram, that if you stare into the abyss for too long, it stares back at you. What do you see in the abyss? Nothing.
And so we have come full circle back to metaphysics - the “inquiry beyond or over beings, which aims to recover them as such and as a whole for our grasp.” The question of the nothing is indeed a metaphysical question, and each metaphysical question interrogates (questions) Dasein in each question.
Referring back yet again to Hegel, for whom pure being and nothing were the same, Heidegger then addresses how the nothing has been thought of in previous metaphysics. “Ex nihilo nihil fit” - nothing comes from nothing. This is from Parmenides, but the line also occurs in Shakespeare’s Hamlet - from the mouth of the Fool, as it happens. It is striking that ‘the question of being’ that opens Being and Time is also Shakespearean: “To be or not to be, that is the question” - again from Hamlet.
The question of nothingness has often arisen in philosophy. Heidegger’s contemporary Theodor Adorno writes of the “ineffable”. In Negative Dialectics, Adorno claims that the task of philosophy is to think through what is “non-identical”; that is, to think through what cannot be thought. We have already mentioned Hegel, but could add Fichte’s metaphor of the “dark void” of the self. And of course, Socrates, who famously remarked: “All I know is that I know nothing”.
There are even echoes of Heidegger’s philosophy in the Bible. In the book of Ecclesiastes occurs the phrase, “Vanity of vanity, all is vanity”: in other words, nothing has any meaning; it is all pointless. There is a very strong theological overtone with Heidegger. It is no coincidence that the christian philosopher and existentialist Kierkegaard was such a powerful influence.
The encounter with the nothing is like seeing through a glass darkly, to use another Biblical metaphor. Heidegger is in this respect more an artist or poet than a strict logician, but is mathematically based philosophy better or more real than metaphysics? “The idea of ‘logic’ itself disintegrates in the turbulence of a more original questioning”, Heidegger writes.
Logic and science are concerned with beings. Heidegger’s focus on mood/attunement is a way to get to Being. The problem with ‘logic’ is that it cannot answer the ‘why?’ questions. However, logicians would counter that the problem with competing metaphysical claims is how to decide between them.
Metaphysics is that which cannot be said by abstract calculation. The equation A = A says only one tautologous thing. From a different perspective, the metaphorical world of metaphysics may be absurd, but it is also hugely suggestive. Poetry as opposed to hard logic. Space does not permit me to develop the argument. Suffice it to say that Heidegger would go on to claim that "[I]f the basic theme of logic is truth, then logic itself is metaphysics." (The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, § 14.)
I will make a few other remarks about the implications of Heidegger’s lecture.
As referred to at the beginning of the piece, the nothing puts the questioners - ourselves - into question. This “going beyond is the essence of metaphysics itself”. For Heidegger, science is concerned with “beings - and nothing besides” whereas “metaphysics is the basic occurrence of Dasein, it is Dasein itself.” It is transcending being. It is going beyond what has already gone beyond.
Heidegger in his metaphysics is recovering a new sense of Being and nothing.
There is a possibility of error in this procedure, as Heidgger notes. We might recall, however, Hegel’s position in the Preface to the Phenomenology, that the real error lies in the fear of error itself. In any case, for Heidegger, “philosophy can never be measured by the standard of the idea of science”. For philosophy brings us back to the most basic question of all metaphysics: “Why are there beings at all, and why not rather nothing?”
The original meaning of metaphysics is that of an inquiry beyond or over (transcending) beings, which seeks to grasp being as a whole. In Heidegger’s survey, he has taken us beyond the normal (forgetful) sense of being to Being via an encounter with the nothing. Thus Heidegger’s metaphysics is a double transcendence of being.
References
The text of ‘What is Metaphysics’ is contained in Basic Writings, edited by David Farrell Krell (Routledge) pp.93-110.
A very useful series of videos on this lecture was made by Dr Greg Sadler on YouTube.
See sections §157-§165 of The Phenomenology of Spirit. There is also a very useful article about the ‘inverted world’ by Peter Kalkavage, ‘Principles of Motion and the Motion of Principles: Hegel's Inverted World’ (2010).
Mark Wrathall, How to Read Heidegger (2005), p.37